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.
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