An Ulster slave-owner in the revolutionary Atlantic

The life and letters of John Black

Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, editor

“Jonathan Wright’s new book, An Ulster Slave-Owner in the Revolutionary Atlantic, makes a significant contribution to the scholarship of Irish participation in the institution of slavery in the Americas during the early nineteenth century. Wright successfully brings the reader face-to-face with an Irish slave-owner, through the letters of John Black … In bringing these documents together and so thoroughly and so ably annotating them and providing a rich context for their understanding, Wright has rendered an important service to the scholarly community and deserves congratulations for his excellent scholarship”. Joe Regan, Irish Studies Review, 28:3

“The role of Irishmen and women in the Atlantic slave trade has become an increasingly prominent topic of scholarly investigation. We now know a lot more about the Irish slave owners who were compensated by the Westminster parliament after the abolition of slavery in the 1830s … and we get a greater insight into how fortunes generated in the Caribbean colonies were re-invested in Irish estates and enterprises … Central to this increased understanding of Ireland’s role in the networks of connections that made up the Atlantic trading and commercial systems has been the exploitation of rich seams of personal and commercial correspondence. Jonathan Wright’s book adds to this literature to offer a fascinating insight into the world of one of the many Ulstermen who helped to shape and was shaped by the currents of the Atlantic world during the revolutionary decades either side of the end of the eighteenth century. Wright presents the full text of twenty letters written by John Black, a Trinidad plantation owner, back to his family in Belfast. This is more than just a scholarly edition however; the letters are contextualised in a lengthy introduction as well as through the careful annotation of people, places and products. The quality of the scholarly apparatus presented here is a credit to both Wright and his publisher. The footnotes are exhaustive and draw on an extraordinary range of sources and could be mined very profitably by historians of Trinidad and Belfast, as well as of Atlantic trade … The letters are wonderfully informative on a range of topics … Wright’s account of mid to late eighteenth-century Belfast is unsurprisingly surefooted, his careful delineation of Black’s slightly documented career in Grenada and his departure for Trinidad in 1784 shows excellent historical detective skills ... Jonathan Wright in expanding our horizons of the world of this Belfast man and his family greatly increases our understanding of how embedded Irish society was in the Atlantic world in the age of revolution and ascendant capitalism.” Patrick Walsh, Irish Economic and Social History 48(1)

“The Black family, thanks to the survival of a copious archive, has attracted the attention of several historians. Originating in Scotland and settling in seventeenth-century Ireland, the Blacks subsequently fanned out around the Atlantic littoral. Although particularly active in trade, members also contributed to intellectual, scientific, and public life. As a result of this diversity, Blacks have appeared in recent studies, not only of the lively commercial communities in the north of Ireland, but in settlements at Bordeaux, Cádiz, and the West Indies. Jonathan Jeffrey Wright, building on the previous investigations, focuses on a more difficult aspect of the Blacks: their owning and trading in slaves … Wright’s substantial introduction not only supplies the complex family context but also explores the political, social, intellectual, and cultural dimensions of Black’s world ... Wright in his meticulous introduction emphasizes the ways in which Black’s letters illumine the shadowy worlds of slave owners.” Toby Barnard, New Hibernia Review Volume 23, Number 4

“Over the past two decades, British West Indian slaveholders have become a prominent point of focus for historians of slavery and abolition, and this collection of letters by an Ulster-born slaveholder is a very useful addition to the growing literature on the subject ... Wright provides a 50-page introduction to Black’s ‘worlds and words’, and he provides annotations to Black’s correspondence, with very detailed information about people, places and events mentioned in the letters ... Black’s letters illuminate the life and times of a fairly ordinary sugar planter – the sort of man whose ambitions and work allowed a British Atlantic world of commerce and slavery to operate. Overall, Wright’s book does an excellent job of placing them within their wider historical contexts, exploring Black’s family background in well-to-do Belfast mercantile circles, along with the world of Caribbean sugar and slavery into which he ventured. With its focus on Trinidad and Ulster, this is also a book that focuses on important but hitherto-overlooked locations and networks. For those reasons, it is an important addition to the literature on slaveholders and the British Atlantic as well as a collection of source material that should prove valuable to future research.” Christopher Petley, Slavery & Abolition 41: 4 (2020)

“[A] superb edition of the correspondence of the Belfast born Trinidad-based plantation owner John Black ... Jonathan Wright’s work on John Black has highlighted how the idea of home and its imagined landscape continued to shape his protagonist long after his departure from Ireland.” Patrick Walsh, Irish Studies Review, 29:2.

“This book publishes twenty letters written by John Black (1753-1836), an Irish slave-owner who eventually settled on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, to his brother Joseph at home in Belfast. Dating from 1799 to 1836, the letters are followed by six letters written by Black's daughter Adele to various correspondents. Jonathan Wright's substantial and far-reaching introduction to the letters introduces Black in all his many guises--son, brother, father, husband, planter, slave-owner, slave-trader, politician, debtor, resident, and exile … Wright's exhaustive footnotes pick up the many interesting threads that connect the Blacks to a social fabric stretching from the Caribbean to mainland America, North and South, to continental Europe and home to Great Britain and Ireland … Married to a French Creole (Bonne Clothilde, _née _Fournilliers, who remains largely a cipher in his letters), John Black demonstrated no great loyalty to any empire, religion, or language. Although he preferred to be ruled by a British administration, like many other Irishmen in the Caribbean he could tone down his nationality and politics when it suited him … Carefully charting the shifting sands of Caribbean and Irish identity, Wright describes well how John Black came to oscillate between which island to call "home." … The book will intrigue those interested in the notorious Thomas Picton scandal--when Trinidad's governor was controversially cleared of the torture of free, mixed-race Luisa Calderon, accused of theft. Wright argues convincingly that Black's so-called intimacy with the governor was more an instance of typical eighteenth-century patronage than a criminal relationship ... A book on an Irishman in Trinidad provides a welcome correction to Jamaica's predominance in Irish histories of the Caribbean … Ireland, in part due to her own sometimes colonial identity, has been slow to recognize her contribution to the transatlantic trade in enslaved people and the plantation economy that developed from their labor … Black's letters remain, for the most part, lively, engaging, and ultimately very expressive missives documenting the essential conundrum—how such a loving father, husband, and brother could have so dehumanized his many enslaved workers that he hardly ever referred to them by name. This absence of humanity can be keenly appreciated in letters such as these, where concerns of the most personal and specific kinds--of children's "creole" fevers, monkey gourds, and Stranmillis fish ponds--are thrown into sharp relief by Black's cold assessment of his plantation's output and that of the human capital he charged with producing its profits. The complex and complicit web of relationships, identities, and agendas that such letters uncover reveals the Caribbean's central significance to any late eighteenth-century history of the Atlantic world and the contribution of another offshore island in making it so.” Finola O'Kane Crimmins (H-Albion. December, 2020)