"To Be Free is Very Sweet:" Racialised
 Representations of Slavery in Maria Nugent's
 Journal and Mary Prince's History

 Cecily Jones
 University of Warwick


After nearly 500 years, the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 finally
brought to an end the legal transatlantic trafficking of millions of African
men, women, and children within the British empire. The trade involved the
kidnap, capture, and forced transportation of African peoples from their
homelands to Caribbean and American colonies, where they were sold into
perpetual slavery. Beginning in the sixteenth century, colonial European
settlers in the Americas had begun to establish a plantation-based system of
crop production, cultivating sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo for
national and international markets. Successful large-scale cultivation
required a steady, cheap and pliable labour force. Initially, the planters
experimented with a mixture of indigenous Amerindian labour and imported
indentured white servants from Europe. For diverse reasons, neither source
adequately and consistently fulfilled the planters' demands, and the
plantocracy was forced to look elsewhere for new labour. They found the
solution to their production problems in Africa, where several European
nations among them Portugal, Spain, and Holland had already
established a lucrative trade in the supply of African slaves to Spain and
Portugal's nascent American colonies.1 Witnessing the success of Brazil's
slave-produced sugar industry, and recognizing the enormous profits to
be accrued from the traffic, British merchants and traders also began
trading operations, supplying enslaved Africans to Caribbean and American
colonies. Between 1640 and 1700, an estimated 134,500 Africans were sold
to plantation owners on the British Caribbean colony of Barbados, where
their unfree forced labour facilitated the island's rise as the first British
colony to develop successful full-scale sugar production. So immense were


' See Williams (1970) and Thomas (1997).