Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica

Nineteenth-century Montreal and Jamaica were worlds apart. Or were they? In Slavery, Geography, and Empire Nelson delivers one of the first Slavery Studies books to juxtapose temperate and tropical slavery and the first such comparative work in Art History. Through an examination of marine landscape art, this book re-connects the two significant British island colonies, sites of colonial ports with profound economic and military value. Through an analysis of prints, illustrated travel books and maps, the author explodes the fallacy of their disconnection, arguing instead that the separation of these colonies was a retroactive fabrication designed in part to rid Canada of its deeply colonial history as a seminal part of Britain's global trading network which enriched the motherland through extensive trade in crops produced by slaves on tropical plantations. Nelson explores the central role of geography and its racialized representation as landscape art in imperial conquest. Breaking new ground, she contemplates how gender and race mediated the aesthetic and scientific access of the mainly white male artists. The first study to explore James Hakewill's Jamaican and William Clark's Antiguan landscapes in depth, it also analyses the Montreal landscapes of men like Thomas Davies, Robert Sproule, George Heriot and James Duncan. Nelson illuminates this moment of deep political crisis - between the end of the slave trade (1807) and complete abolition (1833) - for British slave owners who used visual culture to imagine spaces free of conflict and to alleviate their pervasive anxiety about slave resistance. Slavery, Geography, and Empire explores how vision and cartographic knowledge translated into visual authority, which allowed colonizers to 'civilize' the so-called New World terrains, while belying the oppression of slavery and indigenous displacement.