| Jamestown and Plymouth serve as iconic images of British
migration to the New World. A century later, however, when British
migration was at its peak, the vast majority of men, women,
and children crisscrossing the Atlantic on English ships were
of African, not English, descent. Captives and Voyagers,
a compelling study from Alexander X. Byrd, traces the departures,
voyages, and landings of enslaved and free blacks who left their
homelands in the eighteenth century for British colonies and
examines how displacement and resettlement shaped migrant society
and, in turn, Britain's Atlantic empire.
Captives and Voyagers breaks away from the
conventional image of transatlantic migration and illustrates
how black men and women, enslaved and free, came to populate
the edges of an Anglo-Atlantic world. Whether as settlers
in Sierra Leone or as slaves in Jamaica, these migrants brought
a deep and affecting experience of being in motion to their
new homelands, and as they became firmly ensconced in the
particulars of their new local circumstances they both shaped
and were themselves molded by the demands of the British Atlantic
world, of which they were an essential part.
Byrd focuses on the two largest and most significant streams
of black dislocation: the forced immigration of Africans from
the Biafran interior of present-day southeastern Nigeria to
Jamaica as part of the British slave trade and the emigration
of free blacks from Great Britain and British North America
to Sierra Leone in West Africa. By paying particular attention
to the social and cultural effects of transatlantic migration
on the groups themselves and focusing as well on their place
in the British Empire, Byrd illuminates the meaning and experience
of slavery and liberty for people whose journeys were similarly
beset by extreme violence and catastrophe.
By following the movement of this representative population,
Captives and Voyagers provides a vitally important
view of the British colonial world—its intersection with the
African diaspora.
Alexander X. Byrd is an assistant professor of history
at Rice University, where he teaches African American history
and the history of the African Diaspora. |
