News

Did abolition of the transatlantic slave trade damage enslaved women's health?

In 1807, the British parliament voted to abolish the transatlantic slave trade, following a long campaign led by William Wilberforce.

While most plantation owners opposed abolition, a few did not - including Joseph Foster Barham II, who owned Mesopotamia sugar estate in Jamaica.

Appalled by the suffering caused by the slave trade, Foster Barham (as MP for Stockbridge) voted with Wilberforce in the House of Commons for abolition and voluntarily ceased to purchase new African arrivals in 1792, 15 years before legal abolition. Mesopotamia's records are unusually detailed and record the ages, date of arrival, origin (whether African or born on the estate), health status, and work duties of 1,099 enslaved individuals on the estate between 1762 and 1832.  These manuscripts are preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

On Mesopotamia, withdrawal from the slave trade led to an increase in the number of women sent to work in the cane fields, work considered to be the most arduous and riskiest on a plantation. Survival analysis suggests there was an accompanying  deterioration in their survival chances: estimates suggest the risk of death was about 55% to 75%higher for women arriving on the estate after 1792 than before. To test whether exposure to fieldwork accounts for reduced survival prospects, the actual survival times of slaves (i.e. time to death) was compared with their counterfactual survival times had they never been exposed to fieldwork. The technique employed is intended to avoid problems caused by  the ‘healthy worker survival effect': the tendency for labourers to be withdrawn from a hazardous occupation as their health failed, and reallocated to lighter duties.

Estimates suggest that continuous exposure to fieldwork on a sugar estate, relative to never being exposed, reduced survival times by approximately 30%. Consequently, the dread slaves felt at being sent to the fields appears well placed, especially for women who were less likely to occupy supervisory roles in sugar cultivation and, therefore, enjoyed the least amount of protection.

By Roberta Iley (Biological Sciences 3rd Year)

During summer 2011, I spent three months travelling and living abroad in South East Asia and Australia, learning as much about myself as I did about the ecosystems I went to study.

For the first month and a half of my travels I was living in a hut on a small remote island belonging to Sulawesi, Indonesia.  I was collecting data for my dissertation in Biological Sciences out on the coral reefs, something that involved snorkelling every day over some of the most beautiful reefs in the world - it's a tough degree!  My project was to look at coral rubble, i.e. fragments of coral rubble that accumulate from human and natural disturbances, and which are often washed up into patches.  Inside the crevices and on the large surface areas of these fragments settle a plethora of organisms and I spent hours bent over petri dishes in the lab squinting at beautiful, but tiny, crabs, worms and shrimp.  Perhaps the size of the organisms justifies the fact that they have been so poorly studied, but these coral rubble patches are an increasingly important habitat in the wake of such large human impacts on coral reefs and the potential of increasing intensities of storms with climate change.

I was working alongside a number of fantastic PhD students for this project and it was easy to regain a strict work ethic when you did not have the standard distractions of TV and readily available internet.  This was really my first taste of living a much more ‘primitive' life without the home comforts that I am all too used to. There was no running water on the island with obvious implications for the bathroom arrangements and when the generator shut down at night, the place was plunged into a darkness that I had never really experienced before.  This meant that we went to bed much earlier after the (stunning, holiday brochure-worthy) sunsets and correspondingly rose at the crack of dawn - a time not often seen in the life of an undergraduate student!

Brasenose is pleased to announce the appointment of Jonathan Newell as the College's first Director of Music.  The post is designed to build on the work Nick Prozzillo has done as Graduate Director of Music, giving the college the benefit of an experienced musician supervising not only the choir and chapel music, but also our concerts (professional and amateur) and our wider musical life.

Jonathan is a vastly experienced organist and choral trainer.  A graduate of Durham University, where he was the Organ Scholar of University College, he holds diplomas in organ playing and choir training from the Royal College of Organists, London and Trinity College, London. He also holds an M.A. in Choral Education from the University of Surrey.  As well as experience in the UK, Jonathan has worked abroad - in Norway, running the music in five churches; in Cairo, he was Director of Music at the British International School; in Vienna, he even founded a chamber choir which performed at the Sturm-Graz F.C. Christmas party.  Since 2009, he has been the Chief Examiner for the International Baccalaureate Diploma in music. 

A memorial service was held for Sir John Owen in Coventry Cathedral on Thursday March 24 at 3pm. The service was open to any Brasenose alumni that wanted to attend.