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1 ✛ ✛ ✛ Chapter 1 Christian Ritual in British Slave Societies in 1627, the english began their colonization of Barbados and the creation of a British plantation world that would span the circum-Caribbean. They adapted to their new setting ably, creating a creolized English culture that celebrated metropolitan mores even as it made concessions to life in a tropical environment . That culture proved both durable and replicable. In 1655, Barbadians joined the English forces that sailed across a thousand miles of sparkling Caribbean sea to join in the conquest of Jamaica, an island twenty-six times the size of Barbados and of enormous economic potential. Founded another fifteen years later, South Carolina had roots in Barbados’s fertile soils as well, with more than half of the earliest migrants to that continental colony, both black and white, coming from Barbados. In both of the younger colonies, lessons learned on the older island served settlers well as they created highly successful plantation entrepôts. Growing from a common cultural hearth in Barbados, the British plantation colonies thus shared a colonial experience as slave societies in the strongest sense of the term.1 In Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina, Africans and their descendents composed the majority of the population for almost all of the colonial period. Most of them were enslaved and engaged in plantation agriculture. After short periods as societies with slaves, all three became paradigmatic slave societies, places in which “slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations.”2 In all three colonies, the growth of the enslaved population aroused fear among a white elite that thought African slavery both indispensable and dangerous. Those minorities composed of planters, merchants, and their employees profited from the labor of the enslaved and used those profits to maintain connections to London, from whence came the consumer goods, information, and colonial officials that 2 chapter one reinforced the imperial connection. In addition to common origins, similar economic models based on racial slavery, and abiding cultural and commercial connections , these plantation colonies shared a largely common religious history that furthers their usefulness as a unit of analysis. The Church of England was by law established in all three colonies, and social and political privilege was associated with membership in that church. Establishment meant that the church enjoyed some measure of financial support from the colonial governments, for ministers’ salaries and the maintenance of church buildings in particular. Each parish was a geographic district that elected a vestry, the lay board that handled the temporal matters of the parish, including poor relief, elections, the employment of the minister, roads and bridges, and other duties assigned by the provincial government. Though frequently pretending to it, the Church of England in these colonies enjoyed no monopoly on matters of the divine, surrounded as it was by practitioners of various African religious systems and numbers of Protestant dissenters, especially in Carolina. The subject of this book is the cultural meaning of the worship offered in the established church in these vibrantly diverse and rapidly developing slave societies.3 The three plantation societies of this study were founded in an era in which religious difference between Catholics and Protestants and between Protestants themselves was a central issue in British, European, and imperial affairs. The early settlers of Barbados and Jamaica indeed found their colonial experience directly shaped by the English Civil War and its aftermath. In the 1640s, some Barbadians rioted in support of the Book of Common Prayer and later resisted Parliamentary rule; many of the first English Jamaicans were Parliamentary soldiers , officers, and chaplains, intent on both riches and beating back the pope and the Spanish. The foundation of Carolina in 1670 reflected the legacy of the Civil War’s religious dimension through John Locke and Lord Shaftsbury’s plans for a colony of wide religious tolerance, excepting only Roman Catholics. Though certainly a struggle over the relationship of the monarchy and Parliament, the violence of the 1640s was also inspired by differences regarding the office and power of bishops, the balance of power between clergy and laity , church property, and the furnishing and decoration of churches.4 While the clergy of the Church of England in England would reemerge at the Restoration in 1660–62 with many of their prerogatives restored, in these Anglican colonies the balance of power shifted decisively toward the laity for several reasons. [18.191.216.163] Project MUSE (2024-04-23...

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