Imperial Violence and Uncertain Freedom: Circum-Caribbean Afro-descended Creole Imagination, from Morant Bay to New Orleans

In the fall of 1865, the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica exposed the profound instability of the post-emancipation order in the British West Indies. What began as a protest against a racially biased judiciary and planter domination quickly escalated into violent confrontation. Governor Edward Eyre responded with mass executions, the burning of villages, and the swift condemnation of the Black legislator George William Gordon. Morant Bay revealed, for observers across the Atlantic world, the enduring power of racialized state violence and the ideological continuities linking plantation rule to liberal imperial governance. This presentation analyzes how the Morant Bay Rebellion reverberated in francophone New Orleans, particularly within the New Orleans Tribune, a radical Afro-descended Creole newspaper deeply invested in advocating equal civil rights for people of African descent in the U.S. South. Throughout 1865, Afro-descended Creole editors and their allies had idealized British and French post-slavery policies to critique Louisiana’s coercive labor regime and the reassertion of racial hierarchy after emancipation. The repression in Jamaica shattered these comparisons. It forced Afro-descended Creole thinkers to confront the limits of imperial liberalism, the persistence of racial caste across empires, and the unstable promises attached to “civilized” emancipation. By analyzing francophone and anglophone press coverage in New Orleans alongside French commentary, most notably Louis Blanc’s interpretation of the rebellion through a racial-capitalism framework, this presentation argues that Morant Bay became a transimperial mirror. It compelled Afro-descended Creole activists and some French observers to reassess Black citizenship, the global afterlives of slavery, and inherited racial castes. More than a British imperial crisis, Morant Bay revealed a shared Atlantic struggle over labor, order, and racial equality, exposing the structural contradictions of post-emancipation regimes and shaping how Afro-descended Creole activists would later interpret Reconstruction violence in Louisiana.