Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas.

• Author: Cohen, Theodore
• Position: LATIN AMERICA - Book review

Curry, Christopher. Freedom and Resistance: A Social History of Black Loyalists in the Bahamas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017.

Based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Connecticut, Christopher Curry's Freedom and Resistance traces the history of the approximately 80,000 to 100,000 British loyalists of African descent, both free and enslaved, who traveled from what would soon be the United States to the Bahamas during the American Revolution. These Atlantic Creoles, as he defines them, used their knowledge of the British Atlantic to search unsuccessfully for greater legal and economic freedom. Because the Bahamas lacked the large-scale plantation economies that traditionally catch the attention of historians, the history of black loyalists and of the decades leading up to the abolition of slavery in the Bahamas in 1833 has not been told. Curry looks to fill this gap in this social and legal history. He argues that this migration profoundly shaped the demographic, religious, legal, and political evolution of the Bahamas as a British colony.

Placing the Bahamas within a transnational perspective, Curry contributes to a growing number of studies that interrogate the long-standing narratives about the expansion of abolition and the contraction of slavery in the Atlantic World after the Enlightenment. The egalitarian ideologies of the American Revolution and the Great Awakening and British proclamations about the freedoms theoretically bestowed on black loyalists frame Freedom and Resistance. One of Curry's most interesting findings emerges when he traces the status of free blacks who migrated to this archipelago and found their free status revoked. These African-descended migrants set foot in the Bahamas looking "for freedom rather than a commitment to any place, person, or abstract cause" (2). However, in his analysis of the registers for two ships that traveled from New York, The William and The Nautilus, Curry explains that black loyalists were marked with the ambiguous phrase "in whose possession they are now" to denote their affiliations with the white loyalists who accompanied them on the journey and then employed them as either slaves or apprentices (65).

The tensions between white and black loyalists from the 1770s to the 1810s frame the historical arc of Freedom and Resistance. Curry details the attempts of black loyalists to be political actors, which he tries to resuscitate methodologically through...