Humanities

“We Want Able Blacks”:
The Role of African Slavery in the East India Company, 1658-1757

This project examines the East India Company’s relationship to African slave labor prior to the Battle of Plassey (1757), arguing that the EIC’s trade and state-building efforts were inextricably linked by the Company’s dependence on African slave labor. Examining the slave trade, I argue that the Company’s comparatively-small trade volume was not indicative of slaves’ significance to the Company, rather the trade’s volume was a direct consequence of the specific and vital role African slaves played within the Company-State structure. Unlike the tea, cloth and pepper trades, which were driven by external demand, the Company’s trade in slaves was a direct response to their own internal demand for labor. By being highly selective in their slave cargos, and by grafting the slave trade into their established shipping network, the EIC managed to sustain an otherwise economically inviable trade volume. Without African slave labor the East India Company would not have had the military force, infrastructure or population necessary to establish itself as a Company-State sites like St. Helena and Bencoolen. It is only through the labor of thousands of African slaves that the East India Company had the structural foundation necessary to become a colonial power in the nineteenth-century.

Los Desterrados:
How Cuban Exiles in New York City
Led the Revolutionary Movement Against Spain, 1889-1898

Cuban separatism was a revolutionary movement that removed Spanish colonial rule from the island. It was born in the 1840s in the form of annexationism, annexation to the United States. In the second half of the nineteenth century, separatism became an independence movement. Separatism was not only propagated and molded by Cubans on the island, but by those in exile as well. The United States hosted most of those exiles and the political groups they formed to foment public sympathy and solicit donations. These Cuban juntas were active during the period of the three Cuban wars for independence, 1868-1898. Furthermore, the final War of Cuban Independence (1895-1898) was organized and paid for by the exiles. While Floridian exile communities have seen insightful publications in recent decades, the New York one has not. New York was home to the greatest concentration of leaders and political groups, so I contend it was the most important city outside of Cuba for the separatist movement. This project studies the Cuban exile community in New York City during the 1890s and their separatist activities; it also hones in on the black Cuban intellectuals in the city who were also prominent leaders in the movement and have not yet received the scholarly study they deserve. The ways the exiles raised money, formed societies, created support in the American public and Congress, and lobbied the federal government undermines the traditional understanding of immigrant groups, diplomacy, and sovereignty. These were transnational actors who had a disproportionate effect on American foreign policy, which is evident in the American intervention in the final war of Cuban Independence in 1898.