Dr Clive C C Harris

... 3 Clive Harris, 'British national identity, “race” and empire', Toplumbilim(Journal of Sociology,Istanbul), vol. ... time, this decentred centre had to define a particularistic citizenship and national identity consonant with its de-universalization.5 This is the challenge of multiculturalism. ...

This publication provides the reader with a sample of the varied topics that our Three Continents, One History: Birmingham and the Transatlantic Slave Trade project addressed at the Afro-Caribbean Millennium Centre, Birmingham, England over a period of fifteen months in 2007- 08. Activities were varied: workshop presentations, radio broadcasts (Newstyle Radio) and international simulcasts, summer school, curriculum material (KS3), dramatisations and conferences. The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The book starts with the period before the trafficking in Africans to provide an overview of Africa’s often neglected past. Chapter 2 provides an insight into the breadth and depth of European involvement in the trafficking. The deportation and enforced migration across the Atlantic Ocean – the Middle Passage - have in many respects come to symbolise the experiences of millions of Africans. The slaving ship was effectively a carceral regime in which Africans were considered as nothing more than good or bad ‘parcels’ that could be ‘tight packed’ like sardines and subjected to a panoply of technologies of discipline. The Middle Passage served only to prepare Africans for a plantation and mining regime in the Americas whose sole motive was money/profit. If the process was designed to make a ‘slave’ of the African, it was equally designed to make the European into a ‘master’. It must be said, though, that despite the social, psychological and sexual domination imposed by Europeans, Africans resisted in varied ways at every stage of the journey from the interior of Africa to the plantation in the Americas. In this book, particular attention has been paid to the musical landscape of the Caribbean in allowing us to explore the rich heritage that Africans were able to preserve and recreate.

The heart of our project was to use local archives to disclose the threads that bound the city of Birmingham (UK) to Africa and the Caribbean through the Triangular Trade. The book appropriately references the manufacturing connection and the emergence of Birmingham  as the premier industrial city of Europe. The gun industry has come to symbolise this connection; Birmingham made and assembled the guns that armed the slave trade. The names of these ‘Brummagem ware’ quite often revealed the area of the West African coast where they were destined to be used (Bonny guns, Barbary guns, Angola guns, Windward muskets). There was even a dedicated gun for putting down slaveship insurrections: the swivel blunderbuss There were companies within the city that specialised in providing the one-stop service necessary for a successful slaving voyage: guns, fetters and shackles, articles of everyday consumption, decorative ornaments. In the 1790s, the pre-eminent gun-maker, Samuel Galton Jr, was belatedly put on trial by the Quakers for ‘fabricating instruments for the destruction of mankind’. The production of steam engines benefited another leg of the Triangular Trade.

There has never an empire in history without an accompanying army to defend it. The book explores the particular role that regiments from the West Midland region, sometimes recruited in Birmingham, played in the preservation of the Caribbean slave order. Particular attention is paid to the Haitian Revolutionary Period when it seemed that conflagration threatened.

The irony is that a number of those who were at the forefront in bringing about the industrial progress of the city and indeed sponsoring Olaudah Equiano’s  ‘Narratives’ during his visit to the city in 1790 appeared also to express support for the Abolitionist cause, gradual abolition that is. Belatedly it fell to women in the city to take a more radical stance on the abolition of slavery.

This research outlined and assessed community needs of the African and Caribbean communities of Walsall, West Midlands, England across a range of indicators, and examined some of the opportunities and barriers to community development and uptake of services.

This article explores the genealogy of Churchill's white supremacist liberalism and its contribution to the eugenic governmentality that transformed South Africa into a 'white men's country' in the first decade of the twentieth century. We demonstrate that the key locus of Churchill's racism was to be found not in his epithets and jokes about other groups but in the deeper processes of meaningmaking and meaning enforcement that informed his actions as a war correspondent, rhetorician, soldier, and policy-maker. For Churchill, the 'superior' imperial will of the 'British race', inflamed by an 'innate and healthy desire to conquer' and an 'excessive earth-hunger', could only be satisfied by that which affirmed Self: possession. In South Africa, 'rightful' possession (and dispossession), as the realisation of Galton's positive eugenics, was legitimised by the introduction of white supremacist constitutions for the conquered Boer republics. The basis of this supremacism, which also informed the 1910 Union, was a 'racial or domination contract' that differentiated between the 'people' who could constitute the nation and those who could not, or between persons and nonpersons conceived as a distinction between 'white men' and 'natives'. In the new epistemology of place whiteness came to symbolise power and ownership of property. To secure the reproduction of South Africa as a white lebensraum, it was imperative for Churchill that eugenic governmentality should insert itself deeply into the logic of capitalism. This meant, inter alia, that the technical division of labour had to become a moral or eugenic division of labour which emancipated the herrenvolk from manual labour and guaranteed them wealth, income, property and opportunity to separate themselves from 'native' Otherness. In turn, rather than being exterminated, Africans would be subordinated to the will of Europeans by according the former the permanent position of 'serviceable others' who performed proletarianised labour in the bowels of the earth to undergird white progress. In this society of Morlocks and Eloi, an unrefined apartheid came into existence. Racism, we conclude, was conceived not just as a technology of domination but also as a technology of self.