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A Note on Sources
- Ohio University Press
- Chapter
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A Note on Sources The letters Joseph Burtt wrote to William Cadbury from Africa between June 1905 and March 1907 (covering 311 typescript pages) form the core of this volume. They were collected by James Duffy in the late 1950s and early 1960s for his book A Question of Slavery: Labour Policies in Portuguese Africa and the British Protest, 1850–1920 (1967). Some of the letters—but not all—appear in the court documents that Cadbury Brothers Limited submitted when the firm sued the Standard for libel in 1908. Cadbury Brothers subsequently donated its records about the trial and more broadly about its West African operations to the University of Birmingham Library’s Special Collections (now housed in the Cadbury Research Library) in 1972. The collection of Burtt’s letters apparently was misplaced in this transfer, but it reappeared when several boxes of Duffy’s research notes were donated by his widow to the African Collection at Yale University in 2000. Comparing Burtt’s official report of his trip to the letters he used to compose it, Duffy observed: “The report itself—in any version—is of much less value than the collection of Burtt’s letters to Cadbury, which run to 400 pages.” (One can hope that the missing 89 pages are in the Cadbury Papers [CP].) Cadbury Brothers Limited’s commitment to transparency was evident in its 1972 gift to the University of Birmingham’s Special Collections. In addition, the curator of Yale’s African Collection donated a copy of the recovered Burtt-Cadbury correspondence to the University of Birmingham’s Special Collections.1 In Portugal, the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (the Geographical Society of Lisbon) boasts one of the richest collections of contemporary pamphlets and books documenting the Portuguese Empire in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the Arquivo Histórico Diplomático (the Historical and Diplomatic Archive) in Lisbon, archival collection 3°P-A-3 “Serviçais em S. Tomé” includes—among other documents —the correspondence of the Portuguese consul in Washington, D.C., reporting on Joseph Burtt’s 1909 visit to the United States. Scholars have remembered the cocoa controversy: in 1998, the noted Portuguese historian A. H. de Oliveira Marques would describe the scandal as a “more or less violent A Note on Sources campaign” by Britain against Portugal. In 2003, Cadbury and Burtt’s story became a subplot in Miguel Sousa Tavares’s popular novel Equador. More recently, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo’s scholarly study Livros Brancos, Almas Negras: A “Missão Civilizadora” do Colonialismo Português c. 1870–1930 (White Books, Black Souls: The “Civilizing Mission” of Portuguese Colonialism, c. 1870-1930 [2010]) set the confrontation within the evolving context of the Portuguese “civilizing mission” in Africa.2 Photographs also shaped the cocoa controversy, and in his preface to Jerónimo’s Livros Brancos, Diogo Ramada Curto analyzed the competing interpretations of empire and labor suggested by the pictures of shackles and skulls that appeared in Henry Nevinson’s and Charles Swan’s books and the more formal illustrations chosen by Francisco Mantero. Readers may observe that many of the photographs I have chosen to illustrate Chocolate Islands belong in this latter group—that is, they are staged. For scholars who have studied these images of empire, including James R. Ryan, Wolfram Hartmann, Jeremy Silvester, Patricia Hayes, Paul S. Landau, and Deborah D. Kaspin, that was precisely the point. The photographs were meant to convey the “truth” of empire to their viewers, assert its legitimacy, and shape its consumption. Many of the photographs in Chocolate Islands come from the extensive selection of postcards collected by João Loureiro. They are a fitting representation of what Joseph Burtt encountered as he traveled through São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola, in part because his critics suggested that what he saw was being managed by his Portuguese hosts. Yet even in these images, not everything is hidden: the Angolan serviçal woman in figure 7 appears angry, the São Toméan women in figure 6 seem content, and some of the Angolare children in figure 12 look remarkably carefree.3 William Cadbury did not include photographs in Labour in Portuguese West Africa. Copy 49 of the 50-copy album he circulated in 1909 of the trip he took to West Africa with Burtt survives (in CP 242), but the quality of the photographs is poor. Few captions describe the shiny and faded images. The album was controversial...