Kathleen Wilson, Strolling Players of Empire, Blackface Empire

5 Blackface Empire: or, the Slavery Meridian
Mungo here, Mungo dere,

Mungo everywhere.
Charles Dibdin, The Padlock (1768)
. . . an extravagant and wheeling stranger

of here and everywhere.
William Shakespeare, Othello (1622)
I must apologize for reminding the reader so often, of the gradations

of slavery which subsists throughout Indostan; without carrying this
idea continually with us, it is impossible to form any idea of these
people.
Robert Orme, Historical Fragments of the Mogul Empire (1782)
In nature, “whiteness” nowhere exists; it must be produced by artful

contrasts, by legerdemain, by stage tricks or by laws.
Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead (1996)
How did “blackness” and “whiteness” figure in the patterns of life and
representation that moved across the eighteenth-century theatrical
empire? Examining this question through the lenses of performance yields
important insights about the performance and truth-effects of “race,” on
the stage and off, and for the varieties of “white” peoples, as much as for
their darker-skinned contemporaries. Historical scholarship, critical race
studies and decolonial inquiries of the past two decades have cut through
the Gordian knots created for analysts by early modern European racialist
thinking, as most now agree that Anglo-European social theory since
1492 consistently stacked the deck in its assessments of human difference
and progress.1 Indeed, Enlightenment formulations of difference took
1
See, for example, Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 2021); Lynn T. Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages
(Gainesville, FL, 2015); Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in
the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD, 2011); Cristina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin
Color in the Early Royal Society (Farnham, 2011); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the
Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, 3
(2003), 257–337; Aimé Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, ed.
251
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786317.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

252 Theaters of Empire
“race” as read, in that whatever their intended purpose, they were used to
anchor geopolitical hierarchies in human flesh in ways that secured white
European superiority and identified “blackness” with inferiority, subor-
dination and commodification. Once we stipulate that European ascend-
ancy served as both alpha and omega in the multitudinous attempts to
plot, discursively and otherwise, the “great map of mankind,” to use
Edmund Burke’s much purloined phrase, it should become easier to
accept its racialized and racializing effects. That map plotted the grada-
tions of humanity to place Europeans at the top, and despite efforts to
acknowledge areas where Europeans lagged “behind,” the overall thrust
is beyond dispute. The question for European natural historians of the
long eighteenth century became, how do less advanced peoples learn to
enter the historical streams of “progress” which distinguished European
trajectories?2
The idea of innate or essential difference, gauged through cultural
practice or physical characteristics and articulated through the tropes of
a naturalized historical time, was both artifact and instrument of empire
and nation-state formation. Their technologies of discrimination and
knowledge production, secular and sacred, managed the ideological
economy of bodies, cultural difference and labor that later race science
would subsume.3 The linked but divergent ways in which their
Robin D. G. Kelley (New York, 2012); Kathleen McKendrick, “Plantation Futures,”

Small Axe 17, 3 (Nov. 2013), 1–15; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the
Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983). Literary critics have been more apt to
follow the consequences of this logic in their analyses than historians. See, for example,
Michelle Burnham, Transoceanic America: Risk, Writing, and Revolution in the Global Pacific
(Oxford, 2019); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics
and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC, 2014); Monique Allewaert,
Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood and Colonialism in the American Tropics
(Minneapolis, MN, 2013). Cf. Peter Marshall and Gwyndr Williams, The Great Map of
Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1983).
2
Silvia Federici has recently summed up a welter of this thinking nicely: “division is the
language of the masters.” Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
(New York, 2018), 12. See also Aníbla Quijano, “Eurocentrism and Latin America”
Nepantla: Views from the South 1, 3 (2000), 533–34, who identifies race as springing
from two patterns of power foundational to imperial modernity: domination by conquer-
ors of conquered and control over labor products as the basis of world markets.
3
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race (London, 2003), 6–15 and references there, and note 1
above, where it is clear the “science of surfaces” has been alive and well since the twelfth
century at least. Charlotte Rossler is in the process of revealing the impact of British
provincial race science on Victorian cultural production; Urvashi Charkravarty has
demonstrated its centrality to elite education in the early modern period: Fictions of
Race: Slavery, Servitude and Free Service in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA,
2022). In the eighteenth century, colonial legal and social categories of whiteness and non-
whiteness flowed home to shape conceptions of Scots, Africans, Jews and other margin-
alized populations as being neither white nor British: Dana Rabin, Britain and Its Internal
Others 1750–1800: Under the Rule of Law (Manchester, 2017), 1–10.

Blackface Empire 253
compound ideas were adapted to and instrumentalized across different

national and geographical sites, and in relation to the land, resources and
work that colonizing powers desired, suggests how much of “race” was
“made in the targeting,” as Patrick Wolfe has argued, as the logic of settler
colonialism and extractive “trade” and agriculture encoded racial regimes
that “reproduce the unequal relationship into which Europeans coerced
the populations concerned.” Race was, and is, a practice, used to suborn
different peoples in the service of power. In overseas projects where labor
was the engine of national and international markets, its imperatives
illuminated the clash between and ultimate reconciliation of two
Enlightenment idols, “the great taxonomies of natural science” and
“the political rhetoric of the rights of man,” resulting in the limitation of
those rights to Europeans.4
How the performance of British theater abroad intervened in and
helped shape these larger intellectual and political processes and debates
is the subject of this chapter. As British expansion proceeded apace, the
multiple of ways of being and knowing confronted English peoples across
the globe, crowded the national imagination “at home”5 and demanded
both classification and its representation in the premier art form of the
age, the theater. Here, as elsewhere, notions of race or racialized differ-
ences between people – whether conceived of as cultural or physical, and
whether expressed in the language of history, nation, blood or lineage –
were transferred from medieval discourse about the lower orders to forced
and enslaved laborers over the subsequent centuries, ultimately becoming
central issues for the publics arrayed across British domains.6 In scien-
tific, literary and historical writing, performance and oratory, the prac-
tices of race were harshly demonstrated in slavery and the slave trade,
4
Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of
Genocide Research 8, 4 (2006), 387–409, quotes from 387–88; Sylvia Wynter,
“Jonkonnu in Jamaica,” Jamaica Journal 4 (Jun. 1970), 36, who notes, “It was not white
man, black man, or Indian man, but labour that mattered” in the New World. See also
Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London, 2016). The
argument that race became an “organizing grammar” of polity only in the nineteenth
century does not withstand the scrutiny of early modern scholars: Wilson, Island Race,
passim; Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive
(Philadelphia, PA, 2016); Macarena Barris-Gomez, The Extractive Zone (Durham, NC,
2017); Brooke Newman, A Dark Inheritance: Blood, Race and Sex in Colonial Jamaica (New
Haven, CT, 2018); Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and
Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC, 2021).
5
For which, see Catherine Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in
Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
6
Justin Roberts, “‘Perpetual Servants’: Disease, Migration and Climate Change in the
Evolution of English Racial Slavery,” paper for Chicago Imperial History Seminar,
2021, argues that, by the 1680s, a particularly inflexible variant of racial slavery had
“outcompeted” other forms of bondage across the English empire.

softened in abolitionist discourse, and refurbished in ever more exclu-

sionary terms in the wake of that abolitionism’s success.7 My examination
of theater’s role in producing, embodying or challenging the racializing
assemblages of Euro-British social theory and Enlightenment thought
demonstrates how these formulations and practices get instantiated and
challenged on the ground: as the polyglot, multicultural and hybrid popu-
lations of empire get caught up in the implementation, contestation and
outright rejection of the various forms of European knowledge, structures
and practice, on stage and off, including the putative “knowledge” of
racial difference that was concurrently attempting to suborn darker-
skinned peoples into a global laboring class.
Blackface As Stage Practice

Theatrical representations of blackness could take the lead in parsing,
categorizing and enacting the typologies of darker-skinned peoples, com-
ing together in spite of their differences to congeal around two equally
contradictory and destructive ideas: that “Blackness” constituted the
lowest common denominator of the human, ensuring that “Black” colo-
nials – a group that included, in eighteenth-century description at various
points, African, Australian, Malay, Bengali and Sumatran – were
regarded as inhabiting lower positions on the scales of humanity than
whites; and that, among these, Africans and Australians were not only the
lowest but the most intractable. These ascriptions traveled from south to
north and east to west, as well as the reverse. Although all people of color,
to use an eighteenth-century phrase, of whatever social position, could be
acknowledged as leaders and princes, rajahs and nawabs, they were all
still, in European eyes, emblems of what Europeans were not – peoples
both the most in need of the humanizing impact of European culture and
the most resistant to its effect. Attributions of Blackness in British hands
thus generated their own pernicious hierarchies across empire, as allied or
subjected peoples were assessed and categorized for their abilities to
perform vital services for a British expansionist project.
We saw in Chapter 4 that the Jamaican Maroons provided a potent
demonstration of the varieties of “blackness” and “whiteness” in British
domains. The bearers of each had to struggle with the contingent hier-
archies of status, rights and location that enabled or confirmed their
7
Robinson, Black Marxism, ch. 1 and ch. 6; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital:
Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Katherine Paugh, The Politics
of Reproduction: Race, Medicine and Fertility in the Age of Abolition (Oxford, 2017);
Catherine Hill, Civilizing Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–
1867 (London, 2002).

societies’ ways of wielding these powerful yet impossible designations,

and negotiate their mutable parameters. As the actors in the pageantry of
social distinctions that comprised colonial ports plied their wares of
identity, the representations and experiences of “black,” “white,”
“coloured” and other chromatic labels, as well as geopolitical designa-
tions such as “native,” “Indian,” “African” and “Aboriginal,” were
accordingly transported and reconfigured in places far beyond the reach
of the domains that gave rise to them, and adapted to the demands of local
and global labor markets. And yet these labels’ systemic effects were
widespread. The following examination looks at a series of intersections
where the crossings of racial regimes bring to the fore the confusions and
obfuscations that attended the effort to categorize, impersonate, signify or
suborn people as racial others; at the same time, they paradoxically led to
the installment of geopolitical divisions in the conceptualization of slav-
ery, freedom and Britishness across the West and East Indies.8 In exam-
ining these practices in the contingent contexts that gave them meaning,
we can also see how, insofar as “race” and chromatic British designations
are congruent, “the production of race is chaotic. It is an alchemy of the
intentional and the unintended, of known and unimagined fractures of
cultural forms, or relations of power and the power of social and cultural
relations,” as Cedric Robinson argued. Robinson defines a “racial
regime” straightforwardly as a “constructed social system” in which
race is proposed as “a justification for the relations of power.”9 Within
such regimes, the alibis of even the most rigid, “biological” imputations of
race were always (and continued to be) primarily cultural: hidden internal
incapacities signaled by external markers, from skin color and religion to
skeletal structure and skull shape, that flagged the essential lack that was
the real object of racist imputations. British dominion, however much it
simultaneously aimed at improving and civilizing the land, loves and
habits of people of its different regions, in fact produced racial regimes
that were justified, in whole or in part, by a racialized British superiority,
which was understood as a kind of property right inhering in white bodies
and thus sacrosanct.10 Blackface worked to evoke and contest this uni-
verse of meaning on stage, and in public life, in multiple ways.
8
This largely phantasmagoric meridian is different from the regional analyses of “slaving
zones,” organized materially in several different geographic regions, but it intersects with
them in interesting ways: see Jeff Fynn-Paul and Damian Alan Pargas, eds., Slaving
Zones: Cultural Identities, Ideologies, and Institutions in the Evolution of Global Slavery
(Leiden, 2018).
9
Cedric Robinson, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in
American Theater and Film before World War II (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), xii.
10
See Aileen Moreton-Robinson, White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous
Sovereignty (Minneapolis, MN, 2015).

On stage, masks, costumes and the theatrical practice of “corking up”

were the primary, although by no means only, way of signaling cultural
difference, given that no known person of color performed in British
theaters until Ira Aldridge’s appearance in Manchester in 1823.
Blackface has of course a long history in England, extending back to
medieval pageants and forward to civic ceremonials, court masques and
mumming; its association with early forms of Orientalist imagery and
discourse, particularly of the Moors of North Africa and Spain, has been
noted by literary critics and theater historians.11 Far from being merely
festive, such racialized drag took as its animating principle the right of
well-placed white males to imitate their subordinates and thereby dem-
onstrate their own mastery of white masculinity’s others, whether women,
“natives,” foreigners or servants. As blackface Morris dancers adapted
a “wheeling” associated with West African dancing, the compulsion to
become the other undergirding British theatrical and imperial perfor-
mances enlarged its domain to incorporate the performance practices of
peoples of the world who did not share in those privileges, and whose very
alterity was used to support and invest in the beliefs about the superiority
of its British imitators.12 A view of darker-skinned peoples as necessarily
menial or subordinate was also articulated in and beyond these perfor-
mances. “How shall a Poet thence fancy that [the Venetians] will set
a Negro to be their General, or trust a Moor to defend them against the
Turk?,” Thomas Rymer asked in 1696. “With us a Black-a-moor might
rise to be a Trumpeter, but Shakspear [sic] would not have him less than
a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or
small-coal Wench: Shakespear would provide him the Daughter and kin of
some great Lord, or Privy Councellor.”13 By the mid-eighteenth century,
the association was automatic, as shown in an incident of 1744 at the
Haymarket Theatre of Macklin and Garrick. An audience member’s
11
Claire Sponsler, “Outlaw Masculinities: Drag, Blackface, and Late Medieval Laboring-
Class Festivities,” in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler, eds., Becoming Male in
the Middle Ages (New York, 1997), 321–47; Claire Sponsler, Ritual Imports: Performing
Medieval Drama in America (Ithaca, NY, 2004); Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without
Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (London, 2000);
Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human (Cambridge, 2003); Virginia
Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 2005);
Christian DuComb, Haunted City: Three Centuries of Racial Impersonations in Philadelphia
(Ann Arbor, MI, 2017); Jenna Gibbs, Performing the Temple of Liberty: Slavery, Theater
and Popular. Culture in London and Philadelphia, 1760–1850 (Baltimore, MD, 2014).
12
Robert Hornback, “Extravagant and Wheeling Strangers,” Medieval, Early Modern,
Theory 20, 2 (2008), 197–222.
13
Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedie (1693), 91–92. See also David Worrall,
Harlequin Empire (London, 2007), 22–55; Lenman Thomas Rede, The Road to the
Stage: Or the Performer’s Preceptor (London, 1827).

initial response to seeing Samuel Foote appear onstage as Othello, in

blackface with a Ramillies wig and a full suit of Georgian regimentals
(the standard costume for the period, another repetition with a difference
of Jamaican Maroon garb), was to call out, “Here comes Pompey; where’s
the tea tray?”14 – a remark which attested to the expected role that Black
people were to play in Britain. Black subordination was assumed even by
those hostile to slavery, “obliquely refracting the socio-economic and
colonial interests of Britain as a world power.”15
To be clear, I am not arguing that the use of blackface was an
infallible guide to dominant views of “race” or indeed of human
difference in the long eighteenth century. Rather, I am suggesting
how blackface came to register shifting values and their cultural
expression. Different theatrical genres boasted their own kinds of
racialized characters, so that blackface multiplied the meanings of
“blackness” in public consciousness. For example, pantomime offered
its own intercultural take on race relations: the black-masked
Harlequin was a figure of resistance, a trickster whose conventional
mask signified his alliance with society’s countercultural outlaws, from
the unruly populace to the “Blacks” of Windsor forest and the Blacks
of plantation slavery (Figure 5.1).16 Pantomime was also a fantastical
purveyor of alterity, the carrier of fanciful and magical spheres of
being that circulated alternate visions of community and futurity,
and rendered visible the traces of eastern and southern hemisphere
peoples and their cosmologies into British performance.17
Across the genres and the century, as the depiction of “vocal and
restive” blackface characters became more plentiful, the technologies of
stage blackface could not keep up with the empirical “evidence,” register-
ing “a bewildering and often contradictory set of social and theatrical
14
London Quarterly Review, 94–95 (1854), 259–60. James Quin would later steal this
comment to ridicule Garrick’s appearance as Othello in 1745, reputedly commenting
“Othello . . . Psha! no such thing! There was a little black boy, like Pompey, attending
with a teakettle, fretting and fuming about the stage; but I saw no Othello.”
Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Othello (Baltimore, MD, 1992), 40–42. Vaughan
endorses the notion that Quinn invented this comment in Virginia Mason Vaughan,
Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge, 1994), 121. Moreover, the plot thickens, as it
were, given that Peg Woffington, Garrick’s former amour, was said to have been gifted
a black enslaved boy who was called Pompey: Charles Reade, Peg Woffington (London,
1853).
15
Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black
Character (Cambridge, 2007), 10.
16
John O’Brien, Harlequin Britain (Baltimore, MD, 2004); Jennifer Schacker and
Daniel O’Quinn, eds., The Routledge Pantomime Reader (London, 2021).
17
Jennifer Schacker, Staging Fairyland: Folklore, Children’s Entertainment and Nineteenth
Century Pantomime (Detroit, MI, 2018). For example, drumming as a mimetic art
through which spirits could be placated was a useful device in pantomime.

Figure 5.1 John Rich in The Necromancer, 1753
practices.”18 Older patterns of meaning attached to blackness continued

to infiltrate theatrical representations into the nineteenth century, as did
more current European meanings forged in the crucible of plantocratic
and settler colonial violence. And blackface was of course a wider
European practice. In the French imperial province of Saint-Domingue,
for example, les negres were also represented on stage predominantly by
“corked-up” white actors, and embellished in the costumes of les sau-
vages; mixed race actors also graced the stage, and enslaved musicians
worked in the orchestras, and sometimes had starring soloist roles in
concerts.19 Cuba debuted its first blackface characters in the “teatro
bufo” that emerged in 1812 with the character of the negrito and went
18
Worrall, Harlequin Empire, 38; see also Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony, passim.
19
Lauren Clay, Stagestruck: The Business of Theater in Eighteenth-Century France and Its
Colonies (Ithaca, NY, 2013), ch. 5; Julia Prest, “Pale Imitations: White Performances of
Slave Dance in the Public Theatres of Pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue,” Atlantic

on to negotiate race relations over the next century in sometimes sympa-

thetic and collaborative ways.20 In Britain, a society with slaves21 that
profited enormously on trading captive bodies across the West and East
Indies, an increasing imperative to “naturalism” and ethnographic accu-
racy that first emerged in the 1740s with Macklin’s field research on
Ashkenazi Jews meant that by 1827 the arts of corking up remained
complex and geographically-coded: “How to Colour the Face for the
Representation of Moors, Negroes, etc.” ranged from the “tawny tinge”
produced by “Spanish brown” (to be used for north Africans and, pre-
sumably, Mughals), “coppers” for “Red Indians” and “sables” used to
portray “the negro face”; but how Aboriginals, Bengalis and Maoris, not
to mention Malays and Chinese, would be colored remained up to the
particular manager. Still, color is linked to class, in European eyes, as
Black characters increasingly mobilized expectations about subordinate
or servile status.22
Blackface, then, despite its aspirations, was a fairly crude technology of
surface variation of skin color on stage, and so had to be accompanied by
the kinesthetic cues that were said to be common to people of that hue, as
white Britons counterfeited Africans’ and others’ speech, dialect, gait and
dance, in textual, oral and embodied impersonations. At the same time,
blackface, as either textual or kinesthetic performance, managed to sym-
bolize a kind of surety in a confused and confusing system: whatever their
hue or posture or speech, the politics of temporality at work on the
eighteenth-century stage meant that the characters enacted the archaism
or backwardness that darker-skinned peoples were believed to incarnate
even as they simultaneously revealed their humanity. “Corking up” was
under pressure to both “represent” and differentiate – that is, ethnogra-
phize – rather than caricature, particularly in the service of white ideals. In
this way, the local and distinctive relations that Blackness is posited as
Studies 16 (2019), 502–20; Bernard Camier and Laurent DuBois, “Voltaire et Zaire,
pour le thèâtre des Lumières dan L’aire Atlantique Français,” Revue d’histoire Moderne
and Contemporaine 54, 4 (2007), 39–69; for soloists, see David M. Powers, From
Plantation to Paradise: Cultural Politics and Musical Theatre in French Slave Colonies
1764–1789 (East Lansing, MI, 2014).
20
Jill Lane, Blackface Cuba (Philadelphia, PA, 2005); but see Nicholas R. Jones, Staging
Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain
(Philadelphia, PA, 2019), which makes clear that performances of Black speech long
preceded racist buffoonery in early modern Spanish performance and poetry.
21
Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone (Cambridge, MA, 1998) is the source of the distinction
between “society with slaves” and “slave societies,” which is the difference between
Europe and the New World.
22
Rede, Road to the Stage, 38–40. By 1827, Rede notes that provincial managers had
Othello, for example, played in “Spanish brown” rather than “sable” make-up used for
sub-Saharan African and African-descended characters.

having –to the environment, to labor, to white “civilization” generally, –

gets episodically universalized to all darker-skinned humans. Far from
harmless theatrical practice, then, blackface did the crucial work in shap-
ing increasingly global visions of “blackness” as a subjected and subaltern
state, consolidating and filtering the rich plenitude of Black bodies repre-
sented in the print and theatrical cultures of the period to impact geopo-
litical distinctions and global visions alike.23 The important ideological
work that blackface effects includes the establishment of a “slavery merid-
ian” imposed upon the globe that separated out the “gradations of slav-
ery” that Robert Orme noted into two types: on one side was the chattel
slavery of the Atlantic World, and on the other, the “customary” and local
slaveries that would remain more or less undisturbed for a century. The
slavery meridian, in other words, created geopolitical zones where non-
African slavery could not be recognized. Different kinds of blackness, and
different kinds of slavery, were being parsed from their theatrical presen-
tation, changing the world in the process.
The discussion begins with Isaac Bickerstaffe and Charles Dibdin’s
comic opera The Padlock, first produced at Drury Lane in 1768, which
boasted as its star an enslaved Black servant called Mungo. Scholars have
agreed that the comic opera marked the first instance of minstrelsy on the
Anglo-American stage.24 But British blackface poses an even more inter-
esting story than that. Bickerstaffe’s intervention in transatlantic race rela-
tions relied in the first instance for its invention on Caribbean, rather than
metropolitan, experience and aspiration, and thus raises questions not only
about origin and priority but also about a theatrical practice that imagines
its (metropolitan) audience to be largely, if not exclusively, white, which
was not the case in most colonial theaters. Yet, true to its origin in theatrical
practice, English blackface performance also created the conditions in
which enslaved and Indigenous cultures could appropriate, for curative
or expressive purposes, the colonizers’ representational power and put it to
23
Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-slavery Literature of the Eighteenth
Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1942); Winthrop Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill,
NC, 1968); Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/
Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,”
New Centennial Review 3 (Fall 2003), 257–337; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
trans. Charles M. Markman (London, 1967), 3–25; Allewaert, Ariel’s Ecology, 85–113.
24
George Seilhamer, History of the American Theatre, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, PA, 1889),
vol. 1, 249–50; Felicity Nussbaum, “The Theatre of Empire: Racial Counterfeit, Racial
Realism,” in Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History (Cambridge, 2004), 71–90;
W. T. Lhamon, Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop
(Cambridge, MA, 1998); Monica R. Miller, Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the
Styling of Black Diasporic Identity (Durham, NC, 2009); Julie Carlson, “New Lows in
Eighteenth-Century Theatre: The Rise of Mungo,” European Romantic Review 18, 2
(2007), 139–47; Gibbs, Temple of Liberty, 6–7.

play or to violence. Blackface, a stage practice that authorized white British

actors to play characters with African or otherwise exotic roots from the
princely and tragic Othello and Zanga to the comic Mungo, acquired
shifting valences that come into view as the practice emanated from one
province to another, from London, Montego Bay and Kingston to
Calcutta, St. Helena and Sydney. The Padlock, along with other blackface
texts, practices and performances will be used to illuminate how these
representations registered the cultural tensions and flows at work in an
expanding and belligerent empire. For it was far more than “love and theft”
that was at stake in imperial blackface: it was nothing less than the global
standing and power of the (white) English nation in the world, the privi-
leges of whiteness and its practices of subordination that included the right
to inhabit the spaces of alterity at will, and the mastery of the foreign,
which, as I argued in earlier chapters, was essential to Englishness itself. At
the same time, as blackface traveled across different geopolitical domains, it
acquired new meanings to those who enacted and beheld it, as actors and
audiences of British imperial culture in circulation coded colonial “zones”
of race, gender and freedom across the Atlantic, Indian Ocean and Pacific
worlds. As embodied forms of imperial traffic, blackface performances in
these British outposts also hinted at the unexpected consequences of those
mimetic practices that allowed Britons to attempt to inhabit and resignify
colonial otherness, if only for the duration of the show, as the compulsion to
become the other unleashed its own forms of subversion, both embracing
and altering what is seen as “the same.”
London’s Mungo
The Padlock is a comic opera in which violence, coercion and the buying
and selling of human flesh are central concerns.25 A revision of a short
story by Cervantes called The Jealous Husband, Bickerstaffe keeps the
action in Spain, a move meant to signal both Spanish incivility and
Spaniards’ enthrallment to tyranny, whether monarchical, imperial or
familial. Even more specifically, it is set in Salamanca, an ancient univer-
sity town that sent a great number of settlers to the New World. Don
Diego, an aging bachelor whose fortune, like his slave, is reputed to come
from America, hopes to make Leonora, a young girl of sixteen, his bride.
He has paid off her parents in order to keep her in his house for three
months and at the end of that time to “either to return her to them
25
I will cite from the 1768, 3rd edition, reproduced in Jeffrey Cox, ed., Slavery, Abolition
and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, vol. 5: Drama (London, 2004),
73–107.

spotless, with half that sum for a dowry, or make her [a] true and lawful
wife.” Fearful of being upstaged by a more age-appropriate suitor, Don
Diego locks the girl in her room and requires her to be always accompa-
nied by her old duenna Ursula, a character whose age and person,
according to the Don, supposedly exempt her from any “temptations”
of unlawful handling by the male sex, but whose lasciviousness suggests
her hopes to the contrary. Indeed, Diego’s obliviousness to the sexual
currents swirling through his house are part of the joke: the comic opera
opens with Don Diego celebrating that he had “No male in my house /
Not so much as a mouse; / Then, horns, horns I defy you” (1.1.14–16). As
he would discover, saying it did not make it so.
Leonora confesses herself to be repelled by the old man; she and
Leander, a university student, had already caught each other’s eye at
mass, the only activity allowed her. Don Diego meanwhile shows her
apprehension of him to be well-placed, as he threatens Ursula and sub-
jects the enslaved servant Mungo to various forms of verbal and physical
abuse, even caning him onstage. Mungo, calling himself “poor
Negerman,” then sings the song about his ill-treatment that will soon
become famous:
Dear, what a terrible life am I led
A dog has a better tha’s shelter’d and fed . . .
Night and day ’tis the same
My pain is dere game;
Me wish to de Lord me was dead.
What e’er’s to be done,
Poor black must run;
Mungo here, Mungo dere,
Mungo everywhere.
(1.6.61–69)
But Mungo is a trickster figure and has his own modes of subterfuge:
“I’m lilly tired, massa” he declares repeatedly, a catchphrase that also
comes to circulate outside the stage, and that enables him to do pretty
much as he likes. In contrast to his master, he is very aware of the various
sexual and political tensions at work in the household, observant of the
attractiveness of Leonora and disdainful of both Ursula’s and Diego’s
inappropriate desires; as he sings in his closing refrain, “An owl once took
it in his head, / Wid some young pretty bird to wed; / But when his worship
came to woo, / He could get none but de cuckoo” (2.6.5–8). When Don
Diego leaves the house overnight to see Leonora’s parents, padlocking
them all into the house, Leander shows up, disguised as a disabled min-
strel, and uses the promise of song to convince both Mungo and Ursula
(who for different reasons are attracted to him) to let him come into the

compound over the garden wall. “Let’s be happy while we may: / Now the
old ones’ far away, / Laugh, and sing, and dance, and play; / Harmless
pleasure, why delay?” (1.1.13–16), the four characters sing inside the
garden. In the next scene, Leander has cast off his disguise and tells tales
to the ladies of having been enslaved by Barbary pirates, thus bringing the
Mediterranean into the cachement area of slavery that extends across the
New and Old Worlds. Soon Mungo emerges drunk from the wine cellar,
playing the lute and singing about his love of music, a song that ends with
a warning: “We dance and we sing, / Till we make a house ring, / And,
tied in his garters, old Massa may swing” (2.2.28–30) – a fairly insurrec-
tionary threat in this context. The final scene, where Diego walks in on
the revelry and improbably agrees to let Leander and Leonora marry –
since “sixteen and sixty agree ill together” as he puts it – nonetheless
brings the characters back from the carnivalesque inversions of the
previous scenes, as each sings a song about the lessons learned that
includes their re-placement into their properly hierarchized positions as
raced, aged and gendered subjects. These positions are, of course, them-
selves the effect of the physical and epistemic violence of patriarchy,
slavery and colonialism; of the various “captives” in the house, only
Mungo retains the right to resist – verbally at least: “And, Massa, be
not angry pray / If Neger man a word should say” before relating the story
about the inevitability of an old “owl” attempting to wed a “young pretty
bird” getting cuckolded (2.6.1–4).
Mungo has been extensively analyzed by scholars, who have variously
pegged him as an Orientalized “Spanish Negro” that draws upon late
medieval fears of Moorish power; a quintessential “sentimental” figure
that aided the cause of abolitionism; a powerful emblem of social disorder
from below, associated with the dishonesty, extravagance and depravity
of servants; and even as an example of Blacks as “pet-people,” cherished
emblems of their owners’ aristocratic or aspirant status – indeed, in
London, goldsmiths advertised “silver padlocks” they could make for
“blacks and dogs.” Mungo, as the “first black minstrel,” also mobilized
the “deeply demeaning love,” not to mention theft, that characterized
later Black minstrelsy, inviting the audience to laugh at, sympathize with
but also feel superior to the character’s servility, gullibility and cultural
inheritance.26 But as one of the first stage representatives of the 175,000
Africans that Europeans had shipped to Europe since 1500, Mungo’s
demonstrations of the performativity and illogicality of “race” continues
to exceed even these bounds, as he embraces both similitude and alterity
26
Cox, “Introduction,” in Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 73–74, and references in
n. 25; Vaughan, Performing Blackness, 93–110, n. 24.

as part of the nation and its others. As Julie Carlson has pointed out,
English audiences – whether of the play or its various representations –
took Mungo to be Black, rather than to be a blackface character. Unlike,
say, Othello, whose audiences may have reveled in the excitement of
seeing a glimpse of white flesh on an otherwise blacked-up actor,27
Mungo’s attractiveness lay in his “authenticity,” his pseudo-
ethnographic representation of a figure from Britain’s Atlantic empire –
a point to which we will return. But as Mungo allies with Ursula, Leander
and Leonora against the Don and demonstrates repeatedly his insight and
wisdom about familial and social relations unfolding in the compound, he
can also be seen as marking and symbolizing a capacious sympathy
toward a range of “outsiders” to heteronormative, androcentric British
culture – women, servants, the enslaved, the young, even old women –
that in some ways reflected the playwright’s own status: an outsider (still)
not just for the association with drama and playing, but also for the
homosexuality for which Bickerstaffe would ultimately be banished to
the continent.28 Needless to say, blackface is not ethnographic mimesis –
although it comes to stand in for such, as we shall see – but part of an
ongoing socio-aesthetic produced by colonial violence. Within the over-
whelming context provided by the slave trade and slavery, the shadow of
the gibbet hangs over such enactments of blackface theater, “however
distant to its ideological work such violent death pretends to be.”29 Yet as
Mungo stands and sings against all forms of oppression, he not only
embodies abolitionist argument but also long-standing strands of
English radical resistance theory that circulated in political and feminist
works of the age, allowing, for that moment, for Britishness and its
inherent desire for liberty to be reimagined as capacious enough to
encompass the oppressed through an enslaved Black character.
Whereas Oroonoko set up the binary between “royal” and ordinary
slavery, thereby confirming that most Africans were brutal and barbarous
people,30 and Othello worked to associate jealousy, irrationality and
passion with the so-called “darker skinned races,”31 Mungo enacted the
capacious love of “liberty” and resentment at servitude and second-class
status that resonated with white working-class Englishmen, as well as
women, girls, youths and others who were essential to and yet
27
Carlson, “New Lows in Eighteenth Century Theatre,” 140; Julie Carlson, “Race and
Profit,” in CCBT, 175–78.
28
Peter A. Tasch, The Dramatic Cobbler: The Life and Works of Isaac Bickerstaff (Lewisburg,
PA, 1972).
29
Lhamon Jr, Raising Cain, 21. For Dibdin’s embrace of ethnography-as-acting, see
Chapter 1.
30
Nussbaum, Limits of the Human, 189–238.
31
Cedric Robinson, “The Invention of the Negro,” Social Identities 7, 3 (2001), 329–61.

marginalized from white masculine privilege – on the stage and off

(Figure 5.2).32
In London, Mungo does indeed appear “here, dere and everywhere,”
in the urban culture of the 1770s and 1780s. Blackface Mungos studded
English masquerades, parties and assemblies, as well as prints, pottery
and badges and parliamentary speeches; ministers, minions and
Americans were identified with the character as comic, disadvantaged,
clueless, servile or oppressed; and the multiple faux Mungos that
appeared at public gatherings were analyzed in the weeklies as to their
likeness to the “original,” that is, to Dibdin’s onstage performance as the
character.33 In perhaps the ultimate compliment to the play’s standing as
Figure 5.2 Mr. Dibdin in the Character of MUNGO in the Celebrated

Opera of the PADLOCK [1762]
32
See, for example, The Padlock Open’d, or Mungo’s Medley: Being a choice collection of
the miscellaneous pieces in prose and verse, serious and comic, of Mungo, the padlock-
keeper of Drury Lane (London, 1771), a collection which enjoins readers to speak
out against unjust oppressions, whether of women, “gypsies” or the enslaved.
33
In the opposition press, Jeremiah Dyson, agent to the ministry, is caricatured as Mungo,
following Colonel Barre’s description of him as such in Parliament. Public Advertiser
(Jan. 31, Feb. 10, 1769); Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser (Feb. 13, 1769); London
Chronicle (Apr. 4, May 18, May 23, 1769). The critique of the ministry was carried on
through these characters, which conflated class and race.

an “English” product, an Inuit woman from Labrador Coast attended

a performance of The Padlock and declared herself to be most delighted
with the character of Mungo.34 This was a moment when the Black
population of London was rising to approach 20,000, when enslaved
and free Blacks were deployed in the British navy and merchant marine,
and many had fetched up in London to ply their trades as street perfor-
mers and shopkeepers; the more well-off participated in a civic life that
boasted taverns and assemblies where they and their friends could gather.
As one observer of their activities noted,
Among the sundry fashionable routs or clubs, that are held in town, that of the
Blacks or the Negro servants is not the least. On Wednesday last, no less than fifty-
seven of them, men and women, supped, drank, and entertained themselves with
dancing and music, consisting of violins, French horns, and other instruments at
a public-house in Fleet Street till four [o’clock] in the morning. No whites were
allowed to be present, for all the performers were black.35
Black musicians played in the pleasure gardens and military bands that
plied the metropolis during this period,36 serenaded passersby from
urban street corners or worked as apprentices, artisans, servants and
street-criers. Preeminent free Black men like Ignatius Sancho, writer
and playwright, or Julius Soubise, adopted “kin” of the Duchess of
Queensbury, whose sartorial magnificence and penchant for the aristo-
cratic pastimes of gaming, womanizing, horseracing and fencing made
him one of the most famous “fops” of the period, each generated public
discussion, representation and debate; and each was called Mungo in
prints and drawings, helping to establish the name as slang for a Black
man.37 We will encounter Soubise ahead in Calcutta. For now, the point
is that, as urban dwellers from young bucks to seasoned Parliamentarians
vied over the chance to put on their own blackface Mungo performances,
and North Americans protested at the “ministerial tyranny” that threa-
tened to turn them into slaves, blackness became the part to take on, the
target, for the moment, of that compulsion to become the other that so
animated English theatrical performances across the century, and across
the globe.
34
St. James’s Chronicle (Jan. 14–17, 1769).
35
Quoted in J. Jean Hecht, “Continental and Colonial Servants in 18th Century England,”
Smith College Studies in History 40 (1954), 49.
36
Josephine Wright, “Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), African Composer in England,” Black
Perspective on Music 7, 2 (Autumn 1979), 132–33.
37
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984);
Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire”; Nussbaum, Limits of the Human; Gretchen Gerzina,
Black London: Life before Emancipation (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995); Wilson, Island
Race, ch. 1.

Not surprisingly, a number of plays and pantomimes both prepare for

and spin off of the success of The Padlock by centering on Black(face)
comic characters, the significance of whom changes with the changing
interpretations of slavery in theatrical, print and public culture. James
Townley’s farce, High Life below Stairs, a popular if critically neglected
representation of Black slaves on the London stage, was first played at
Drury Lane in 1759 and then appeared several times a year through the
rest of the century (Figure 5.3). Townley’s farce about servants aping
their masters was slanted toward imperial experience: Kingston, an
impertinent Black servant brought from the West Indies, runs amok
while his master, Lovel, an absentee planter resident in London, is
away on business. (Lovel declares early on to Freeman, “in Jamaica,
before I was ten year old, I had an hundred Blacks kissing my feet
everyday.”) Kingston and fellow servants, including Cloe – perhaps
the first female blackface comic character, although it is a non-speaking
Figure 5.3 “Cookey, you go,” High Life below Stairs, 1774. John
Bretherton after Thomas Orde, Lord Bolton. Courtesy Lewis Walpole
Library

part38 – along with the servants of other great men in the neighborhood,
raid Lovel’s wine cellar and ape the manners and pretensions of their
masters and mistresses. The farce overall was said to “the best representa-
tion of the creole West Indian,” according to one critic, who compared it
favorably to Cumberland’s more famous play.39 Most significant was that
Kingston spoke in dialect, a move that may have signaled his inferior status
on the scale of humanity and within the public sphere itself.40 For whites in
the colonies, such a linguistic tell as an accent was a source of shame, as
demonstrated when Miss Cheer of the American Company performed in
Kingston a farce she had written, A West Indian’s Lady Arrival in London, in
which the female protagonist used the West Indian dialect in a particular
context and was resoundingly booed. As Cheer pointed out later in
a “card” in the Royal Gazette, the character’s use of a West Indian patois
was intended to be a disguise, much like the lead in The Irish Widow “who
assumes the Brogue in order to disgust a disagreeable lover.” Whites and
Blacks must speak differently, it seemed, so linguistic crossings were
rejected as proof of colonial inferiority spawned by mimetic excess.
Alternately, it is certainly possible to see dramatic dialects as a shout-out
to a new kind of people now recognized as belonging to the British polity –
the English-speaking Caribbean slave.41 The play caused riots and distur-
bances in London, Bristol, Liverpool and Edinburgh;42 at the latter, when
it was put on in 1760, some of the “Party-coloured [i.e., parti-colored, or
multicolored, such as Harlequin] Fraternity” took exception to its por-
trayal of their comrades, and even threatened “the Manager of the play-
house with Death, and that they would pull down the House if the Farce is
acted anymore.”43 Whether the servants were multiracial or multicultural
is unclear, but the protestors were making a point about the antagonisms
between masters and servants that allowed the latter to see their solidarity
across racial lines. The play continued to be hissed by servants into the
nineteenth century.
Henry Bate’s comic opera The Black-a-Moor Washed White, staged
almost a decade after The Padlock’s first performance, also attempted to
38
Her opposite, the white servant Kitty, was played by the redoubtable Mrs. Abingdon.
39
Critical Review (Feb. 1771).
40
Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-
Century America (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
41
Royal Gazette (Sep. 29, 1781). Roxann Wheeler, “Sounding Blackish: West Indian
Pidgin in London Performance and Print,” ECS 51, 1 (Fall 2017), 63–87.
42
See, for example, Oliver Grey, An Apology for the Servants . . .. Occasioned by the
Representation of the Farce called High Life below Stairs (1760); Peter Cunningham’s New
Jest Book; or, Modern High Life below Stairs (1781).
43
London Evening Post (Jan. 26–29, 1760). John O’Keeffe recalled one of the riots when it
was played in Dublin: Recollections of the Life, 2 vols. (London,1826), vol. 1, 161–62.

play on a rising anxiety about the presence of Blacks in London and

provincial towns as well as the influence of East and West Indians on
the domestic polity. Its performance caused a riot at the Theatre Royal on
January 22, 1776, which Garrick himself had to quell. In the play, the
patriarch Sir Oddfish has a young Englishman, Frederic, who is in love
with Oddfish’s daughter, disguise himself as a Negro to spy on the old
man’s wife and the daughter, thereby cementing “Blackness” with crafti-
ness, disguise and intrigue. As a Black, he wore “The dress I wore at the
last Masquerade” and speaks in Mungo’s Caribbean dialect. His inter-
ventions cause a white servant to exclaim “the times are turn’d topsey
turvey, that white Englishmen should give place to foreign Blacks!” before
he sings,
Must a Christian man’s Son born and bred up
By a Negar be flung in disgrace?
Be a sham’d for to hold his poor head up
’Cause as how he has got a white face?
...
British boys will still be right
’Till they prove that black is white!44
The ensuing riot carried over to subsequent performances over several
nights.45 Finally, in the harlequinade Harlequin Mungo, or a Peep into the
Tower, performed at the Royalty Theatre – situated in a long-standing
multiracial suburb of London – from November 1781 to January 1788,
the slave Mungo is transformed into the blackfaced Harlequin as he
moves from a West Indian plantation to London, where he marries the
white slaveowner’s daughter. Played entirely by white actors in blackface,
the roles of Mungo and Harlequin were taken by comic actor Charles Lee
Lewes, who, like Dibdin, was a lithe and agile actor who could incorpo-
rate “quick quasi-balletic turns, leaps and gymnastic tricks.” At the age of
forty-seven, Lewes had just relinquished the Mungo role.46
Clearly, abolitionism and Black visibility combined to make “black-
ness” a topic of interest in metropolitan Britain that was capable of
mobilizing anxieties about foreignness and slavery, as well as critiques
of empire and its practices of racial subordination. The threat that Black
people were believed to pose to white society had changed from fear of
44
HL LA 400, [Henry Bate], The Black-a-Moor Wash’d White, Jan. 22, 1776, Drury Lane.
45
See George Winchester Stone, London Stage, vol. 4 (1747–76), 1948–49, for details of the
riots.
46
Worrall, Harlequin Empire, 24; David Mayer, Harlequin in His Element: The English
Element (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 38–40; Nussbaum, Limits of the Human; Nussbaum,
“Theatre of Empire.”

Moorish conquest to fear of slavery itself, both for the values it introduced
into the polity and for the apprehension of an inevitable retribution that
only abolition could stave off. Long before George Colman Jr.’s play The
Africans: Or, War, Love and Duty (1808), based on Mungo Park’s
explorations of the continent and staged a year after the slave trade’s
abolition, the slave trade had been drawn into disrepute, and Britons
were poising themselves to celebrate their roles as liberators of the conti-
nent and worldwide purveyors of liberty as a natural right and “an English
sentiment.”47 But in the meantime, and particularly as the violence and
upheavals resulting from consecutive revolutions in America had unset-
tled opinion on both sides of the Atlantic, Black visibility within metro-
politan and provincial spaces also aroused older sensitivities to the
miscegenation, cultural and biological, that colonies seemed to produce
in their products and people. Blackness had come home, but then seemed
to threaten the principles of white supremacy that underpinned British
power there and in the empire.
Nevertheless, in performance terms, Blackness was clearly the new
black, offering an opportunity for audiences to weigh in on
a demographic phenomenon that it has taken scholars longer to catch
up to: metropolitan Britain as a multiracial space.48 Accordingly, as the
character of “Mungo” continued to evolve over the later decades of the
century, his dialect and mannerisms became codified as a part of
a phenomenological Blackness (whether positively or negatively identi-
fied); he also gathered to himself characteristics that would come to be
associated with abolitionist sentiment as a whole. In 1787, a new epilogue
to The Padlock, printed in Gentleman’s Magazine, made the antislavery
resonances of the play ever more clear: thanking the audience for its
laughter, Mungo asks them to think about what it means to be a slave in
a land of freedom, where the common privileges of British humanity –
Christianization, marriage, the right to own one’s wife and children as
well as other forms of property – are denied him:
Why then am I devoid of all to live,
That manly comforts to a man can give? . . ..
[Because] I was born in Afric’s tawny strand,
And you in fair Britannia’s fairer land.
Comes freedom then from colour? Blush with shame,
And let strong Nature’s crimson mark your blame.
47
Gibbs, Temple of Liberty, 95–101, quote from 101.
48
Literary critics were to the fore here: Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire”; Nussbaum, Limits
of the Human; Ragussis, Theatrical Nation. For historical accounts, see Wilson, Island
Race, ch. 1; Gerzina, Black London; Folarin Shyllon, Black People in Britain 1555–1833
(London, 1977).

. . . O sons of freedom! equalise your laws,

Be all consistent – plead the Negro’s cause;
That all the nations in your code may see
The British Negro, like the Briton, free.
. . . To break for ever this disgraceful chain,
...
That he may share the great Creator’s social plan;
For though no Briton, Mungo is a man!49
Surveying questions about Black belonging in a transimperial polity,
Mungo at first admits that there could be “British Negroes” but ends
with a denial of that very possibility.
Caribbean Origins
However, despite his emergence as a distinctive if multivalent British
character, Mungo’s provenance lay firmly in Jamaica. The Black slave
with the Scottish name spoke with a West Indian accent – an event of
world historical importance because this character was based on the
experience of John Moody, né John Cochran, actor and scion of
Jamaica’s colonial theater, where he had led a theater company for several
years in the decade following the ’45. Discovered by Garrick at
a performance of the Norwich Company of Comedians in 1759,
Moody, a transatlantic player in all senses of both terms, quickly became
established at Drury Lane as a character actor, whose comic, loutish but
invariably good-hearted Irishmen were celebrated by audiences and
critics alike.50 Yet Moody was also known for his willingness to take on
other ethnic roles; he brought to life the first Black comic character on the
English stage, the drunken Black servant Kingston in James Townley’s
High Life below Stairs (1759), a performance which benefited from
Moody’s facility with Jamaican patois. Not surprisingly, then, the part
of Mungo was specifically written for Moody by actor and composer
Charles Dibdin. As Dibdin noted, he
had promised Moody that he should perform the part [of Mungo]; and indeed,
The part would never have been written as it is but for Moody’s suggestions, who
Had been in the West-Indies, and knew, of course, the dialect of the negroes.
Leaving aside for now the notion of a “negro dialect,” apparently culled
from the twenty or so West African language groups spoken by the
49
Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 56, 913–14.
50
Moody was said to have made the character of Major O’Flaherty in The West Indian the
“hero of the audience . . . the favourite of boxes as well the galleries.” Theatrical Biography:
Or, Memoirs of the Principal Performers of the Theatres Royal (London, 1772), vol. 1, 89.

enslaved in Jamaica, Moody was in rehearsal playing Mungo when it was

discovered he was unable to manage the songs, an event that may not have
been accidental. “I had taken some care of this in the composition of the
songs,” Dibdin admitted later; “I knew what I could do with it [the part],
and I knew I ought to have had it from the beginning”51 – showing
a distinctly Mungo-like savvy in thwarting the intentions of his master,
David Garrick, manager at Drury Lane, who had given Moody the part.
And indeed, several of Mungo’s characteristics could have been mined
from the streets and plantation walks of Jamaica: his love of satire and
understatement, his extreme fondness for music, his facility with
European and other foreign instruments, and his sly interest in the sexual
escapades going on around him were all evident in the behavior and
practices of Black Jamaicans, enslaved and free.
We can be even more specific, because the blackface character refer-
enced the exigencies of everyday life on an island where slaves and slavery
dominated economic, social and even political life. Jamaica’s visual
appearance as a “black colony” was remarked upon by countless visitors
to the island over the period, as noted earlier. Their dominance in the
towns and on the plantations led whites to complain about the ubiquity of
their dependents, under whose watchful gaze they never had a minute to
themselves.52 And yet, amidst the dominating presence of African and
Afro-Caribbean bodies all around them, it is not surprising that we find
some white Jamaicans all too ready to sympathize with or impersonate,
intentionally and not, the peoples they suborned. As early as 1709, in
A Letter from a Merchant at Jamaica to a Member of Parliament in London,
touching the African Trade, to which is added, a Speech made by a Black of
Gardaloupe [sic], at the Funeral of a Fellow-Negro, a Jamaican writer took
on the persona of an enslaved orator at a friend’s funeral to levy a critique
of slavery itself, arguing that it was “contrary to the Laws of God and
Nature” in one of the earliest use of natural rights arguments against
slavery.53 A Dr. James Smith wrote a petition that was presented to the
assembly as an “authentic” document written by the enslaved of Kingston
in 1748.54 In 1760, the young Bryan Edwards, visiting his ancestral
51
Tasch, Dramatic Cobbler, 154.
52
A Short Journey in the West Indies, in which Are Interspersed Curious Anecdotes and
Characters, 2 vols. (London, 1790), vol. 1, 24–25; Matthew Gregory Lewis, Journal of
a West India Proprietor Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica (London, 1834),
129–39. Lewis’s journal covers the years 1815–18.
53
Jack Greene, “‘A Plain and Natural Right to Life and Liberty’: An Early Natural Rights
Attack on the Excesses of the Slave System in Colonial British America,” WMQ, 3rd ser.,
57, 4 (2000), 793–808.
54
James Robertson, “A 1748 ‘Petition of Negro Slaves,’” WMQ, 3rd ser., 67, 2 (2010),
319–36.

Jamaican estates for the first time, right after Tacky’s Revolt, and clearly
affected by the plight of the enslaved there, took on the persona of an
enslaved rebel in his “Stanzas Occasioned on the Death of Alico, An
African slave, condemned for rebellion in Jamaica, 1760.” Edwards’
poem made visible the gallows that awaited one who pledged “eternal
war” against the “pale tyrants” who so blasted him: “The death thou givst
shall but combine / to mock thy baffled rage / . . . Thou bring’st to misery’s
bosom rest / And freedom to the slave!”55 An “empire without slaves” may
have been impossible in practice in the torrid zones, but these blackface
performances circulating across imperial print circuits suggest it was
clearly not inconceivable.56
What is perhaps even more striking was the adoption of a degree of
involuntary blackface – the ultimate revenge of mimesis and propin-
quity – by white residents as they lived, consumed, produced and
reproduced among their Black and colored population, making them
the frequent target of metropolitan criticism. The oft-made com-
plaints about the influence of African social customs on whites, espe-
cially children and women, and denunciations of white men’s
predilections for keeping colored mistresses – a “favorite Sultana” of
a “vulgar, ugly, Scotch Sultan” with broods of “yellow” children was
how Lady Nugent described one such liaison – was a custom followed
by “almost all the agents, attornies [sic], merchants and shopkeepers”
in the towns.57 These cultural crossings, including adoption of alter
sexual and kin-making practice, increased the numbers and restiveness
of the freed Blacks, who were already pressing for greater political and
social rights, and provided substantive proof to European charges that
white creoles had gone native.58 The Maroons add another, often
ignored, dimension to the flows of mimicry and difference that were
swirling across the island, providing a dangerous role model for
55
Bryan Edwards, Poems: Chiefly Written in the West Indies (London, 1760). A Kingston
debating society in 1774 weighed the morality and “sound policy” of the slave trade with
the laws of nature over several meetings, ultimately concluding, by a majority, that the
trade to Africa for slaves was consistent with neither. Thomas Southey, Chronological
History of the West Indies, 3 vols. (London, 1827), vol. 1, 420–21. James Robertson, “An
Essay Concerning Slavery: A Mid-18th Century Analysis from Jamaica,” Slavery &
Abolition 33, 1 (Mar. 2012), 65–85; Southey, Chronological History, vol. 2, 420–21,
quoted in Robertson, “Essay Concerning Slavery,” 65–66.
56
Christopher L. Brown, “Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the
Age of the American Revolution,” WMQ 56, 2 (1999), 273–306.
57
Philip Wright and Verene Shepherd, eds., Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in
Jamaica from 1801–1805 (Kingston, 2002), 29.
58
Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed Race Jamaicans in Britain and the
Atlantic Family, 1733–1833 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018), 143–248. Abolitionists in Britain
were familiar with many of Britain’s mixed-race families.

triumphal Blackness.59 Hence, the politics of subjectivity on Jamaica

was marked by undulating scales of whiteness and blackness and
their performance that could not be fixed, through which some
Blacks got away with “acting white,” and even had the authority to
enforce their will. This intricate social scape, I am suggesting, in
which the varieties of blackness and whiteness remained unstable
(despite efforts of law and custom to superintend their supposed
fixity) was entangled within Mungo’s ambiguous complexity as
a character.
So, if Mungo was not the “first blackface comic character” of the
century – that accolade belongs to Kingston of High Life below Stairs –
then neither was he particularly “English” in his creation. Rather,
Mungo was a colonial product, an artifact of the slave trade, slavery
and Jamaican everyday life. In imperial circuits at least, Mungo circu-
lated as an icon of British racial capitalism, whatever additional specific
valences he carried as an uppity, disobedient or dangerous servant who
may or may not warrant sympathy as a victim of white heteropatriarchy.
Like French valet Figaro in Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro (1778),
Mungo was a witness to the follies of high life above the stairs, the
resident “insider” able to take in the action from above and below;
a servant who could clearly be master, if wit and sense were the criteria,
and who uses both to rise above his supposed superiors’ social artifice
and claim the truth. In this multivalent form, the character ultimately
traveled off both islands, Britain and Jamaica, to impress its hierarchies
upon other peoples and domains.60 Jamaica’s tutelary role in metropoli-
tan and imperial mores is underlined by the ease with which Mungo is
regurgitated as both a British creation and an ethnographic copy – of
a “real” Black – gathering characteristics to himself that, whatever the
intention of his authors, would become associated with British cultural
authority in the world.
Blackface in the Black Colony

The Padlock had its first recorded performance in Jamaica on March 19,
1777, at the new theater in Montego Bay, opened just two days before.
Montego Bay had grown quickly since the early years of the century, and
by 1768 was reckoned to be “the emporium of the western part of the
island,” and the chief port for the enslaved destined to work on its
plantations. With wealth came aspirations to gentility, so theater was
59 60
See Chapter 4. Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 35.

not far behind. The Cornwall Chronicle, begun in 1773 by James Fannin,
put it this way,
A well regulated theatre has ever been held, by the wisest and most learned men of
the present age, a matter of the highest utility, not only, as the most rational
entertainment human nature is capable of enjoying, but in being highly conducive
to enlarge the mind, polish the manners, and . . . to “shew virtue her own image,
vice her own feature,” and the very age and body of the times, his form and
pressure.
As the paraphrase from Hamlet reveals, provinciality need not circum-

scribe learning, gentility or civility, all of which were simultaneously
cultivated and expressed by the performance and spectatorship of
English drama and its reportage in the local press. The amalgamated
American Company, fleeing the ban of the Continental Congress
October 1774, were the island’s most glamorous refugees. Under David
Douglass, manager, they had commissioned or revamped theaters up and
down the eastern seaboard of the continental colonies, in Kingston and
Spanish Town, and now enlarged their domain to the western parishes of
Jamaica, where the Company in residence was managed by actor John
Henry. The performance seemed to have gone well with the actors “justly
meriting the applause bestowed” according to the Cornwall Chronicle
(although “particularly” so in the main piece of Hamlet).61
But Montego Bay was a surprising place to stage The Padlock. The year
before, in 1776, the area had witnessed a serious slave conspiracy,
believed to be instigated by disaffected Leeward Maroons, in which creole
slaves were meant to take advantage of the departure for America of the
British man-of-war docked at Falmouth by rising, burning the town of
Montego Bay and poisoning its water supply.62 The Maroons were in
contact with the Cuban Maroons of the southeastern mountains,
a connection that had long worried the colonial government.63 At the
same time, the impact of the multiplying rhetorics of “resistance” and
independence on the island, evidenced not least by the accounts of
“traitorous” letters and pamphlets circulating across the island encourag-
ing Jamaicans to rebel, may have had the most effect on creole slaves.
“You are sensible Sir that messages are Easily Carried backward and
forward to and from Negroes,” wrote a clearly alarmed Colonel John
61
Quotes from Cornwall Chronicle, Mar. 22, 1777; and for detailed accounts, see
Odai Johnson, Absence and Memory in American Colonial Theater: Fiorelli’s Plaster
(New York, 2006); Odai Johnson and William J. Burling, eds., The Colonial American
Stage, 1665–1774: A Documentary Calendar (Madison, NJ, 2002).
62
Richard Sheridan, “The Jamaican Slave Insurrection of 1776,” Journal of Negro History
61 (1976), 290–308.
63
Julius Scott, The Common Wind (London, 2018), 118–20.

Grizzell, located in the port of St. Lucca, to Governor Basil Keith; “We
find that almost every Estate without Exception to Leeward of Lucca in
this Parish [Hanover] are deeply concerned in the Intended
Insurrection.”64 The steady drumbeat of enslaved rebellion on the island
had been quickly memorialized in enslaved culture across generations
and ethnic groupings; the enslaved on Simon Taylor’s estate were “all
acquainted with what happened in this parish forty years ago,” referring
to Tacky’s Revolt.65 Hence the slave conspiracy of 1776, led by enslaved
creoles, drew upon these memories, as well as the conversations of the
planters, to declare an end to the white supremacist thrall under which
they labored, demonstrating in the process that enslaved Africans’ and
Caribbeans’ activist roles in the age of revolutions was substantial, and
they were as keen to “clamour for liberty” as any disaffected American
patriot. As the action spread to the parish of Vere and to the town of
Montego Bay, Governor Sir Basil Keith declared martial law and militias
from several parishes descended on the region, taking in at least four
dozen of the conspirators and executing most on the spot, their decapi-
tated heads left to fester on pikes.66
Perhaps reassured by this grisly theater of retribution and performance
of waste, Henry determined to go on with the show and to incorporate it
into the larger spectacle with a performance of The Padlock, an assertion of
recovery of confidence in their own hegemony during plots and imperial
war. But we can attempt to extrapolate what was missing from this
scenario, much like the audience did. “The audiences were of all colours
and descriptions: blacks, browns, Jews and whites,” Lady Nugent noted
of a Spanish Town theater audience in 1803.67 The inclusion of Black
people was not typical of most British Caribbean towns: in Charleston,
a city council ordinance forbidding blackface from being performed and
Blacks from attending the theater was issued in 1795, “lest the negroes in
Charleston should conceive, from being represented on the stage, and
64
NA CO 137/71, Volume of Dispatches, Memorials etc. from Jamaica, /240 and /238,
both Jul. 19, 1776.
65
Institute of Commonwealth Studies Library, Taylor Family papers ICS/I/I/43, Simon
Taylor to George Hibbert, Kingston, Oct. 31, 1807. Thanks to Christer Petley for
generously sharing this with me. See Christer Petley, White Fury: A Jamaican
Slaveholder and the Age of Revolution (Oxford, 2018); Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt
(Cambridge, MA, 2020).
66
For the most recent treatment of the 1776 conspiracy, see Andrew O’Shaughnessy, An
Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, PA,
2000), 142–45. The insurrection was the latest to aim at nothing less than the murder of
all whites and domination of the island, a common goal of many Atlantic slave revolts,
from Jamaica to St. Helena; it included the most trusted creole enslaved artisans and
leaders and may have included Leeward Maroon assistance.
67
Wright and Shepherd, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 148.

having their colour, dress, manners, and customs imitated by the white
people, that they were very important personages,” as a English visitor
summed up in 1810.68 Representation, face-to-face and virtual, mat-
tered, and the erasure of Black numerical and cultural dominance in the
theater auditorium “restaged” the local community, for a moment, as
white.69 But Black people would be in attendance at all the activities
supposedly exclusive to whites, and the theaters in Kingston, Spanish
Town and Montego Bay were no exceptions. Here Black and colored people
gathered in numbers and without exclusionary rules until the early nine-
teenth century.70 The theatrical publics of Jamaica engaged in the politically
complex interchanges of history, memory, substitution and reinvention that
made colonies possible, as peoples and actions on and off the stage became
conduits of new ways of being and belonging and of defining an institutional
space in a register quite distinct from, even as it was emulative of, metropoli-
tan patterns. At the same time as they horrified and disrupted British visitors
with their polycultural brio, Jamaican audiences saw themselves as viable
and appropriate arbiters of the action going on, on the stage and off, as the
space of appearance made local publics tangible. English-style theater thus
became as much a part of the indigenization of Black peoples in Jamaica as
the transcultural rituals of Jonkonnu.71
Black and brown servants, some dressed in livery but more donning the
striped osnaburg trousers that marked enslaved apparel, popped up in the
boxes and upper gallery, the latter also holding soldiers, sailors and beaux;
shopkeeper, overseers, merchants (Jewish and not) and their wives
crowded in the pit; and the silk-clad elite women, both white and mixed-
race, decorated the boxes, as their daughters flirted with the beaux above
and below: all came together to enjoy the theatrical spectacle of a slave
who talked back and talked Black.72 In Montego Bay as in Kingston,
mixed-race women set the tone in taste and fashion for the vast majority of
island society, despite the efforts of white women to discourage such
68
Worrall, Harlequin Empire, 27.
69
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic
World (Durham, NC, 2014), 140–41.
70
By 1813 there were separate prices quoted for box seats: 13s.4d and 10s., the latter for
people of color. In 1815, an attempt to force free Blacks to use an alternative back
entrance to the Harbour Street Theatre resulted in rioting and troops being called in.
Errol Hill, The Jamaican Stage: Profile of a Colonial Theatre, 1655–1900 (Amherst, MA,
1992). One white Englishmen complained that the pit was “filled with the children of
Israel,” the dress boxes “contained the other white inhabitants and their families,
the second tier the brown ladies, who seemed more intent on catching the eyes of the
young buccras below” while the gallery “was tended by Bungo himself, in all his glory of
blackface, . . . lips, white eyes and ivory teeth.” Michael Scott, The Cruise of the Midge
(Edinburgh, 1836), vol. 2, 274–75.
71
Wynter, “Jonkonnu,” 34–48. 72 Miller, Slaves to Fashion, 40.

emulation. White men never tired of rhapsodizing about the “coloured

beauties” they ogled, whom they considered to be objects of public
desire.73 Hence, as the empire’s most “silent” denizens, in archival
terms, gathered in the auditorium of Montego Bay’s new theater, the official,
royally sanctioned space for the performances of origins and futures, their
bodies and life-ways were registered as important, integral actors in a social
environment where white supremacy depended upon visualizing its subor-
dinates. Within this matrix, The Padlock could not help but take on new
meanings that served the complicated processes involved in British slavery
and colonization and the novel social circumstances they produced. Mungo
raised the specters of freedom for women, Blacks, the lower orders and
anyone else oppressed by white patriarchal power, but it could also do
other ideological work. How could Mungo perform his magic as a trickster
on the island that had given birth to his character?
Blackface on the Jamaican stage was familiar to audiences. John
Moody’s fondness for Shakespeare make it very likely that Othello was
part of the repertoire of his early company; certainly, the play about the
Moor of Venice had been part of the Hallam Company’s cycle of plays
on coming to America.74 Blackface characters appeared on the
American Company stage not only in Shakespeare but also in harlequi-
nades, performed in a black mask as noted earlier. Several harlequinades
made regular appearances on local stages, such as in David Garrick’s
Harlequin Invasion – which paints Black people as “foreign” invaders of
the Shakespearean polity – as well as Woodward’s Robinson Crusoe, or
Harlequin Friday, with set designed by Phililipe Jacques de
Loutherbourg, known for his dramatic moving stage scenes that in this
instance included a forest where “a Dance of Savages” proceeded as the
moon rose.75 The black mask, which probably originally referenced
captured and enslaved Africans of the Roman empire,76 and held to be
“non-referential” in England, in Jamaica very demonstrably displayed
ontological meaning, in this case summoning Black bodies to consider
the social, political and fantastical relations unfolding onstage and so
creating unexpected spectrums of identification and disavowal,
73
Wright and Shepherd, Lady Nugent’s Journal, 65–70, 78; [Isaac Teale], The Sable Venus,
An Ode: Inscribed to Bryan Edwards, Esq. (Kingston, 1765); Chapter 1; Kay Dian Kriz,
“Marketing Mulâtresses in Agostino Brunias’s West Indian Scenes,” in Slavery, Sugar
and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies (New Haven, CT, 2008),
37–70.
74
William Dunlap, A History of American Theatre (Urbana, IL, 2005).
75
For this, see the inimitable Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Hero (Oxford,
1992).
76
O’Brien, Harlequin Britain; the harlequinades were performed from the 1750s through
the 1790s.

including the alternative definitions of who was “property” and who

“human.” In West African and transculturated Caribbean cultures, the
interactions of the spiritual and the material were ubiquitous, and the
fantastical a commonplace to think with. The black mask could thus
conjure, almost against its wearer’s intentions, alternate worlds of spirit,
solace and revenge that remained beyond white apprehension.77 If such
ideas or reactions shaped Black Jamaicans’ engagement with British
pantomime, or Mungo, now seems impossible to affirm. But it seems
clear that the European dramatic practice of blackface-influenced Black
Jamaican’s interpretation of white intentions.
From the white British perspective, Mungo’s interpellation of race and
nation was expressed through embodied cues that included a propensity
for dancing, singing and playing at inappropriate times. As such, the
character became a convenient hook upon which to hang the plantocratic
response to abolitionism’s accusations of planter barbarity. Rather than
falling back on the older argument that the enslaved were “savages” who
benefited from the ameliorations of civilization under slavery, planters
began to argue that the enslaved were children – or, at least, dependents,
much like women, children and servants, who required the firm paternal
hand of British masters and their laws to guide them toward productive
lives.78 This association between social immaturity and the need for
strong central government was also being worked out in the physiocratic
and stadial theory of the day, as newly revised roles were being given to
Indigenes, savages and Jews as well as to women themselves as transi-
tional figures to modern British commercial civilization.79 With the winds
of abolition blowing in their faces, the plantocracy likened themselves to
latter-day Roman patriarchs, alternating their defense of slavery from the
enslaved’s alleged savagery to their childishness – passionate, untutored,
prone to excess and requiring a firm paternal hand. His fondness for drink
and interest in sex notwithstanding, Mungo’s masculinity is not overtly
77
Columbian Magazine 1 (Aug. 1796), 162–64, 191–92; Characteristic Traits of the
Creolian and African Negroes in Jamaica etc. etc. (Kingston, 1798), first published in
Columbian Magazine 2 (Aug. 1797); Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols.
(London, 1774), vol. 2, 381–485, insists that Negroes are “beasts,” “barbarous” and
untrustworthy; Bryan Edwards, writing two decades later, sees the enslaved and Africans
as barbarous but childlike, an attitude Monk Lewis, among others, articulates emphati-
cally in the early nineteenth century. Bryan Edwards, History, Civil and Commercial, of the
West Indies (London, 1793), vol. 2, 70–186, 100–02 and passim; Lewis, Journal, 58–59
and passim.
78
For example, Charles Fourier, Oeuvres Complétes, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1846–8), vol. 1, 56;
Michael Hoberman, “Home of the Jewish Nation: London Jews in the 18th Century
Anglo-American Imaginary,” ECS 50, 3 (2016–17), 269–88.
79
Sylvia Sebastiani, The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender and the Limits of Progress
(Basingstoke, 2008).

acknowledged in the play, where, after padlocking his house, Don Diego
tells of having “banish’d all that had the show of man, or male kind,”
(1.1.14–15) from the premises, thus excluding Mungo from the category
of human and masculine. Through this double negation, Mungo could be
seen as ejecting the specters of biological miscegenation and white cruelty
from a Jamaican culture that was vilified in the metropolis for both,
substituting instead a happy-go-lucky fellow with a misguided master –
one of the few bad apples said to give the entire harvest a bad name.
Hence, if for the opponents of slavery or patriarchy the Jamaican
Mungo marked out the homologies between all forms of oppression, for
others it furnished a symbolic repertoire that consolidated new kinds of
differences between white and Black and allowed the masters and the
lower orders of whatever color to redefine the terms of their opposition.
The uptick in blackface parts and performances over the next decade,
when High Life below Stairs became a frequent afterpiece and
Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771), featuring clouds of Black servants
and a young West Indian planter who could not tell the difference
between prostitutes and respectable women, were performed with
regularity.80 But in the contexts of fratricidal and international war,
there was also a sort of frantic rehearsal of national origins and nationalis-
tic myths, of comparisons with the ancient Roman past, of blood ties
across territories, and of the “glorious cause” of dying for one’s country.
Whitehead’s neoclassical The Roman Father – which depicts both the grief
and the glory of war for the virtuous cause of republican kingship – played
in 1778, and The Tempest, advertised as having new productions and
scenery that were modeled on the latest, Loutherbourgian techniques of
the London stage, the next year.81 Like The Padlock and Inkle and Yarico,
these English plays in New World settings demonstrated how “abolition-
ist,” noble savage and classical republican plays could mobilize very
different readings in the mise-en-scène of a West Indian theater, where
the local structures of demography, power, violence and resistance had
opened up pluriversal modalities of being and resisting.
As Jamaican elites scrambled to protect the island against the war on
the open seas that was going on with France, Spain and Holland, local
performances of Venice Preserv’d and Othello in 1780 in Kingston marked
a novel conjuncture that brought the politics of blackface in a Black
colony to the fore and revealed some of its more unvarnished truths.
“[H]ear naught but the sound of Drum, Fife and Trumpet,” the
80
Jamaican Mercury (Mar. 11–18, 1780; Feb. 5–12, 1780). For an overview of Jamaican
Harlequinades, see Richardson Wright, Revels in Jamaica 1682–1838 (New York, 1937),
147–53.
81
Jamaica Mercury (Feb. 5–12, Jul. 29–Aug. 5, 1780; Mar. 11–18, 1780).

Reverend William Jones reported, and the throngs of soldiers, sailors and
militiamen in the Kingston streets choked local traffic.82 As early as 1776,
some planters expressed a willingness to provide slaves for military
service;83 once France entered the conflict in 1778, planters and militia
commanders inveigled the assembly to allow the creation of separate
British regiments of free Blacks and coloreds, whom they believed to be
“used to the climate and inured to Labour and fatigue,” “less susceptible
to diseases” and to possess “extraordinary alertness in Military
maneuvers.”84 The unpopular Governor John Dalling, whose scheme in
1780 to take down the Spanish empire in Central America by attacking
their settlements in Nicaragua sent Jamaican and British troops on a wild
goose chase across Honduras – and gave Captain Horatio Nelson his first
taste of glory, when he scaled a wall with his sword drawn and subdued
two Spanish fighters – had the prescience to raise a regiment of free
coloreds, with their own uniforms, salaries, equipment and training, to
help meet the French invasion scares of 1778 and 1779. Both efforts were
ultimately repelled by the West India lobby in London, who argued,
according to agent Stephen Fuller, that “incorporating them with the
white will not be endured” and they were thus abruptly disbanded.85
But until word of this disallowance trickled back, the arming of free
coloreds and slaves proceeded. Heartened by the “number of volunteers,
people of colour, etc.” who had “eagerly embrace[d] the most splendid
opportunity that fortune ever presented to the warlike sons of Britain”
and further chuffed by the news of Rodney’s victory over the Spanish at
Cape St. Vincent on the Portuguese coast, Dalling endorsed a joint billing
of the orientalist harlequinade The Genii and Richard Cumberland’s The
Brothers, or the Shipwreck “for the entertainment of the Volunteers.”86 It is
82
Diary of the Rev. William Jones, ed. Octavius Francis Christie (Ann Arbor, MI, 1929),
39–40. Meetings of “Planters and Merchants” were held in the tavern of Spanish Town
and Kingston, and the Jamaica Committee in London met at the London Tavern to press
the ministry for additional troops, supplies and money for to pay bounties to volunteers.
Royal Gazette (Mar. 23, Apr. 1–8, 1780).
83
St. James’s Chronicle (Nov. 5–7, 1776).
84
NA CO 140/60 petition of William Henry Ricketts to the Assembly of Jamaica, Oct. 30,
1778. Other advocates included William Lewis and Nathaniel Beckford. See also Mercury
(Aug. 20, 1779); Dalling’s advertisement addressed to “Free People of Colour,” RG
Supplement (Apr. 1/8, 1780).
85
Fuller MSS 256 f. 133, Memorial of Stephen Fuller to Lord Germain, Dec. 23/24, 1778,
quoted in O’Shaughnessy, Empire Divided, 176. For Nelson, see Kathleen Wilson,
“Nelson and the People: Manliness, Patriotism and Body Politics,” in
David Cannadine, ed., Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy (Basingstoke,
2005), 49–66.
86
Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury (Apr. 1, 1780). For a review of The Brothers, see
Universal Magazine (Dec. 1769), which notes it an undistinguished comedy best
known for its “very striking and uncommon” representation of a storm and shipwreck.

hard not to read into this convergence an acknowledgement of “people of

colour” as both proper subjects of both the British state and polity and of
representation, The Genii served to reference their presence and The
Brothers – a mild comedy best known for its scenic devices of conjuring
the atmosphere of being at sea, as a ship lay stranded at the back of the
stage – to bolster their spirits before a dangerous mission.
At the same time, royalist printers David Douglass and William Aikman
ran articles and published broadsides that exhorted everyone to “fight in
defence [sic] of your country,” including free Blacks, coloreds and “trusty
slaves,” interpellating each as a British subject: “Preserve your Title to the rich
Inheritance, and ardently grasp the glorious opportunity that now presents
itself, of proving, that the Virtue of your Ancestors has not degenerated.” “Let
us remember from whom we are descended,” another article exhorted:
“FROM BRITONS! – whose very name in former times has blanched the
faces of their foes with fear.”87 Excessive whiteness could become a liability in
crises, and indeed here they seemed to be suggesting that the ruddy and
colored alike were better suited to cast their fates in with the imperial state.
Indeed, with Jamaica becoming the favored “refuge” of American loyalists,
some 3000 of them, who fled South Carolina, Georgia, East Florida, Virginia
and New York for the tropical opulence of Jamaica along with some 8000
slaves, the island was awash with new people and faces, most of them Black.88
Many arrived simultaneously, half-starved and ragged, only to face more
deprivation on the island, where hurricanes and trading restrictions created
a famine that killed 15,000 slaves. Not surprisingly, Kingston, where most of
the refugees were lodged, exhibited “affecting and unusual spectacles of
Misfortune and Misery . . . in all parts of the town,” according to the
Kingston Vestry minutes. George III’s son, Prince William Henry (the future
William IV), on naval duty in Jamaica, was so touched by the scenes of their
destitution and misery as they filed off the ships that he offered “a handsome
sum . . . for the relief of those refuges from South Carolina,”89 and the
assembly followed with a bill to exempt those “with Intent to settle” from
taxes, thus offering philanthropic and deficiency relief in one fell swoop.90
87
“To the Gentlemen, who are Owners or Possessors of SLAVES,” Jamaica [soon Royal]
Gazette (Mar. 25, 1775); “To the Free People of Colour,” Supplement to the Royal Gazette
(Apr. 1–8, 1780); Jamaica Gazette (Mar. 18, 1780); Jamaica Mercury (Sep. 4, Aug. 21,
28, 1779); quote from Aug. 28. For a fuller discussion see O’Shaughnessy, Empire
Divided, 160–211.
88
Maya Jasonoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York,
2011), 245–77, figures from 251.
89
JA, Kingston Vestry Minutes, Nov. 5, 1784; Prince William Henry quoted by Jasonoff,
Liberty’s Exiles, 255.
90
JAJ, Feb. 11–14, 1783. For a list of those who took advantage of this offer, see “A List of
Loyalists in Jamaica,” NLJ, MS 1842.

Significantly, the duke of Clarence was equally moved to avail himself

of the local brothels run by Black and mixed-race women, contracting or
passing on a bad case of venereal disease that left him incapacitated for
a time but that revved up the satires about the propensity for royal and
aristocratic libertinism. In the James Gillray cartoon Wouski (1787;
Figure 5.4), the prince embraces a buxom Black woman, named after
the African servant character who served the Black Indian maid Yarico in
Colman’s 1787 version of Inkle and Yarico, and exhibit A in the depraved
sexual tastes wrought by an empire of slavery. Do his striped trousers
indicate his populist support for common sailors? Or did they associate
him with Mungo by suggesting that even royal white men were “slaves” to
the charms of Black Caribbean women?
In the event, as troop numbers on the island swelled and the Maroons
were brought to the Kingston Theatre to prepare for a threatened French
invasion, the “Gentlemen of the Army” put on a benefit for the Company
of Comedians to a “numerous and brilliant Assembly” with the bill
Otway’s Venice Preserv’d and Garrick’s Lethe. The play, a staple of the
eighteenth-century repertoire and played as avidly in Calcutta as
Kingston, is a largely Whiggish defense of the people’s right to resist
Figure 5.4 James Gillray, WOUSKI, 1787

tyranny. It had been staged regularly since the 1740s in Kingston. In

1763, a prologue spoken at one of its representations reminded the
audience that they, like the drama itself, had chosen “British soil” on
which to live, “Where freedom blooms, where peace and favour smile’
and arts were a ‘blessing Britons only prize.”91 In 1780, British army
officers, taking on both male and female roles, confirmed their nation’s
commitment to a slave society by their performance of one of the great
“patriotic” plays of the century, privileging white homosocial bonding
and patriotism (Pierre and Jaffier) over “mentally unstable” woman
(Belvidera), on an island where the love for women, particularly Black
and brown women, had long been pointed to as the most destabilizing
force by metropolitan observers and travelers. It also touched on local
radical sentiment directed against the imperial government. Pierre’s dec-
laration that he is the “enemy of those Domestic Traitors, who make us
slaves, and tell us ‘it’s our Charter’” is the perfect foil for the authoritari-
anism of a garrisoned Kingston under martial law, demonstrating that the
ongoing struggle to redefine liberty extended to the imperial provinces
beyond British shores, whose residents sacrificed the most to bring “civi-
lization” to “savage” wastes.
The 1780 performance “would have reflected honour on approved
veteran actors,” the Royal Gazette noted, but what was most celebrated
was the new prologue, “written for the occasion,” by the gentleman
officer performing the character of Pierre. It proclaimed itself “an unvar-
nished Tale” telling the audience “who we are and why we’re here,”
a narrative that discloses both the philosophical and political role of
theater, and the military, on Jamaica, each vital in helping to wrest the
island from its barbarous beginnings into a “fruitful Land” that “disclose-
[s] its wealth to Cultivation’s hand.” The soldiers who milled about the
towns, the former “Sons of Rage,” were transformed on this occasion into
“Vot’ries Love, Of Friendship, Mirth and Wine” to sustain Jamaica’s
status and future as a cradle of white civilization. The Kingston Theatre
auditorium was made analogous to the topography of the island, as the
inhabitants of the “mountains” (the boxes), the “enclosures” (the side
boxes) and the “fine Savannah” (pit) were hailed to recognize each other
as participants in the civilizing project underway. By far the most extraor-
dinary claim was that made by the officer playing Pierre:
. . . But hold – one word, as we’re New Negroes here,
King’s overseers, but not too severe.92
91 92
NLJ; Edwards, Poems. Jamaican Mercury (Oct. 1–8, 1780).

Acknowledging the degree to which mutual survival and prosperity

depended upon enslaved bodies and likening the technologies of govern-
ance under martial law and of oversight on the plantation as equivalent,
the prologue rehearsed the racialized myths of Jamaica’s settlement – that
its white colonists had salvaged civilization out of savagery (Indigenous,
Spanish and African) and that, even more, thanks to the army, Britons
had maintained the former in the face of all the odds. The fact that the
“mountains” were the resort of the Maroons, tormentors of the enslaved
and transgressor of white privilege alike, seemed not to bother the actor’s
analogy. Instead, as the army declared itself to be “New Negroes” on the
island, they not only proclaimed that their ultimate duty lay toward their
various audiences, from the townspeople of Kingston to their royal mas-
ter, but they also became the agents of the “blackness” held to be impera-
tive to tropical success by all colonial projectors, a white occupation of
blackness in the service of empire. Slavery and playing, it seems, could be
made equally entertaining to Jamaican audiences, a mirror that refracted
back to them their hierarchical, militaristic racial regime in all its riches
and accomplishments. The aura of ethnographic “authenticity” sur-
rounding blackface shows its indispensability to the symbolic economy
of white supremacy, as the army claims the role of the most requisite
player on the island of Jamaica, the African-descended slave.
Blackface, then, printed or embodied, and even the spurious type
claimed by the officer above, could be used for a variety of social and
political ends, acting as temporary solvent to and longer-lasting reinforce-
ment of the established order. But its ultimate status in white hands was to
display the mastery of white over Black, of Englishness over its lesser
variants, and of a “World History” through which Europe narrated its
superiority over its various others as it moved through space and time –
from east to west and back again – and ranked Caribbean and colonial
societies generally beneath metropolitan standards of civilization and
virtue. In this context, it is not surprising, perhaps, that John Henry
deemed the time right to stage Othello in Kingston. Virginia Vaughan
has stressed that, at the height of the slave trade, metropolitan Britons
“conceived Shakespeare’s Moor as a high ranking, noble, courageous
general, an English gentleman, represented by a white actor in
blackface.”93 African-descended peoples of the metropole were most
often identified in the public mind with servants; in Jamaica, Blacks
were certainly servants, but they also bore the complex associations of
blackness with insurrection and freedom that made Othello’s significance
much less straightforward. As a general, the character could be seen as
93
Vaughan, Performing Blackness, 98–99.

endorsing the nobility and courage of Maroon-style blackness (a trope

which planter Bryan Edwards himself acknowledged in his poem Alico, as
did several other literary and dramatic works, as well as the instigator of
Tacky’s Revolt, who was said to be “a prince in his own country”). But
Henry solved that potential problem fairly quickly: although British regi-
mentals and a long black flowing wig had become standard for the
performance of the character within Britain, in Kingston Henry played
the general in “the uniform of a British General, his face black and hair
woolly” – a direct parody of the Maroons, among whom the stolen
costumes now bedecked their leader and their lesser-privileged comrades,
enslaved soldiers.94 Indeed, Othello, that “extravagant and wheeling
stranger / of here and everywhere,” like Mungo, “here, there and every-
where,” gets catapulted into imperial circuits as a representative of the
wider imperial polity, where “blackness” was simultaneously the enabling
element of white prosperity and privilege and a badge of servitude; and
even as blackness was resignified to emphasize the dangers of African
mobility, anger and thirst for retribution, as a passionate and jealous
Black man is goaded into undertaking a terrible crime.95 The fear of
that putative need for retribution simmering among the enslaved was
what fired up white parodies of blackness in its several forms and made
it soothing, as the plantocracy could project an assumed but tenuous
superiority over all contenders. The Padlock became one of the most
popular afterpieces at the Montego Bay and Kingston theaters for the
next two decades, making its final appearance in 1813, although it con-
tinued to be performed up and down the eastern seaboard of the newly
founded United States, as well as at British settlements in Madras (1788),
Cape Town (1815), Calcutta (1783–6) and Bombay (1820).96
Before we leave Jamaica, it is important to see that the love and theft of
Mungo moved both ways. The version of Mungo that appeared in prints
and masquerades displayed the blackface slave in shiny satin striped
pajamas (Figure 5.5), a move that mimicked the propensity for Britons
in England and Jamaica to dress their slaves up in liveries of rich fabrics
but that also directly copied and theatricalized the course, osnaburg
striped trousers that Jamaican field slaves wore, while also giving that
costume a jester-ish air. This theft replays in reverse the appropriation of
94
Dunlap, American Theatre, 81; for the stolen costumes from the Kingston Theatre, see
Chapter 4.
95
William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Russ McDonald (London, 2001), 1.1.133–35; for the
carnivalistic playing of Othello as parodic comedy or even charivari, see Michael Bristol,
Carnival and Theatre (London, 1989), and Robinson, “Invention of the Negro.”
96
Cox, “Introduction”; Padlock; Gibbs, Temple of Liberty, 55–66; Dunlap, American
Theatre, 78–85; Odai Johnson, “The Georgian Theatre in Colonial America,” in
OHGT, 656–72.

Figure 5.5 Mr. Dibdin in the Character of MUNGO, 1769. A black and
white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For the color
version, please refer to the plate section
British garb by the privileged Blacks of Jamaica, the Maroons, who

donned who cast-off regimentals and ruffled shirts of British officers to
highlight their status as advantaged actors in the Atlantic colonial order.
Now a free Briton takes up the enslaved’s garb to signal that blackness was
a site available for white occupation, a move and meaning publicized up
and down the eastern seaboard by Lewis Hallam of Jamaica’s American
Company, who had incorporated The Padlock and the part of Mungo into
his repertoire by 1769.97 Enslaved and free Blacks and people of color,
some hiding in the theater and others paying for gallery seats or boxes,
may have enjoyed watching a doppelganger cavort onstage, tormenting
97
Hallam’s success in the role was claimed to be due to his “familiarity” with the dialect of
the Negroes; but “the mischief of it was, that his success in this part infected all his other
performances, and his negro dialect manifested itself in every character he undertook, to
such a degree as to provoke to application to him by way of criticism the words of his own
song of Mungo here! Mungo dere! Mungo everywhere!” Hallam file, Harvard Theatre
Collection.

his master and allying with other characters also oppressed by white
patriarchal power. On an island where the different registers of perfor-
mance became part of the war of attrition between the Maroons, the
enslaved and the colonial state – where the Maroons dressed as British
officers, the enslaved as Maroons; where the enslaved took up the deadly
Maroon custom of ambush, which involved covering a warrior with leaves
to more effectively stage an ambuscade, to play as Jack-in-the Green at
Set Girl dances in a warning about the practice’s potential uses; and
where skillful performances of freedom could evacuate the most powerful
attributions of legal status and racial difference – the performances of
enslavement could travel off the stage and onto the streets in other festive
performances that demonstrated the bodily inventiveness of a supposed
inferior people. As Jonkonnu donned Mungo’s striped trousers and the
Maroons’ military coat (Figure 4.2) to stride in freedom across the public
spaces of Kingston and Montego Bay, the formal and informal theaters of
colonialism converged in an example of a vernacular mimesis that appro-
priated and simultaneously rejected colonialism’s forms of knowledge,
reminding onlookers that the limits to resistance had not been reached,
that the curative object – Mungo’s striped trousers – could be used to
invoke a cultural sphere beyond white supremacy. Just as the black mask
of the harlequin could signal slavery as the “Effronterie . . . against Nature,”
as Colley Cibber put it, so, too, could the whiteface of the urban Jonkonnu
reverse this association, making the mask of whiteness the signifier of the
inappropriate and overweening power of the plantocracy and its allies, the
Maroons. The power of whiteness to inhabit the subject position of
others, in other words – a power not meant to be mutual – was thus
challenged by the Black inhabitation of white and Maroon posturing and
pretension. As the majority population defied the structures of European
racial hierarchy – at least for the duration of the show – they also took
names for a future retribution.
Calcutta in Black and White

Mungo’s history and performance was not limited to the Atlantic World.
Rather, through the synergistic cross-flows of empire, he fetched up in
British Calcutta over three decades beginning in the 1770s. Tracking his
appearance and its subcontinental currents illuminates hidden aspects of
the history of everyday life in the British settlement, where the stories of
the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds become intertwined.
By the 1780s, the formerly “diseased, impoverished outpost” of Calcutta
had been transformed into a sparkling new urban settlement (thanks largely
to Indian knowledge, skill and manpower), and its status as a community

no longer had to be imagined.98 The English newspapers exulted in “the

rapid progress we are daily making in all those polite and refined entertain-
ments, which have so strong a tendency to humanize the mind, and render
life pleasing and agreeable,” vying with “most of the cities even in Europe”
with its “plays, masquerades, assemblies and concerts,” “public walks, and
genteel places of resort” abounding “with belles and beaux” and, above all,
with “numerous beauties, who charm the eye and enthrall the heart”: “is
there a more lovely sight of the enchanting fair to be seen in Kensington
Gardens of a morning, than what the Course presents to our view . . . in an
evening?”99 Women’s condition is here used to scale the culture of the
settlement and is found to be ample; indeed, the presence of young and
available women, looking for husbands, clearly elevated Calcutta in the
eyes of its residents and assessors, and young women were some of the most
avid attenders of theater, masquerades and assemblies, where local perfor-
mances of identity and alterity mimed and mined local life in a riotous
jumble, almost to the point where no one personated themselves.
Anglo-Indians’ love of masquerade or fancy dress may have exceeded that
of even the most devoted lovers of the form in England, indicating how this
aspect of urban sociability, amplified and complicated in Calcutta, veered
more dangerously toward deracination: performed aspects of “Oriental”
culture served as both conduit and condition of coloniality while sited in
the East, revealing the “compulsion to become the other” to be a strategy of
British rule.100 Masked revelers attended ridottos, fête champêtres, balls and
assemblies for which the movable feast of everyday life was ransacked to
produce theatrical and topical characters, English, European, African,
Asian; Hindu and Muslim; “tribal” and “foreign,” that sought to outdo
each other in the elaborateness of their disguises.101 At a masquerade held
in the assembly rooms above the theater, Mungo made his first appearance in
this quarter of the globe. The characters gathered on this occasion included
“a Pigmy Gentleman and Lady, who danced a very laughable Minuet,”
“Ladies in Hindostanny Dresses” (perhaps seeking to outdo Sophie
Plowden’s nautch girl performance), a Brahmin, a Hindu priest, a Rajah,
98
Natasha Eaton, Mimesis across Empire: Artworks and Networks in India (Durham, NC,
2013), 22.
99
Calcutta Gazette (Oct. 21, 1784).
100
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century
Culture and Fiction (Stanford, CA, 1986).
101
Calcutta Gazette (Dec. 9–16, 1780; Aug 18–25, 1781; Mar. 24, Apr. 7, Apr. 14, 1785).
Donning blackface for performance seemed to have been a rite of passage for some new
EIC writers: George Bogle at dinner in Cape Town was led by his dinner host’s enslaved
servants from the “East Indies” into cross-dressing as a Black woman and mingling
among the guests: “[I]t was a long time before my acquaintances knew me again, so
nicely had the girls disguised me.” Mitchell Library, Glasgow, Bogle Papers BO 7/8,
False Bay (S.A.), May 19, 1770. Many thanks to Jocelyn Zimmerman for this reference.

“An Excellent Jew,” a Joeghee (yogi), a Subadar (the chief native officer of an
EIC regiment of sepoy), a “Moorshee” (munshi) and “several Moghuls,
Persians and Moormen.” 102 The other notable reveler was none other
than a domino “with a Mungo’s face” who created “inexpressible merri-
ment” by his “Antic postures and mimicking Gesture,” as spectators
delighted in the presence of a comic character from a distant, but linked
colonial milieu. This is the first reported instance of this transformation in the
domino’s mask from plain or ornately scrolled black or ghostly white and
bird-like visors to the “Mungo’s face” that the account describes and that
Figure 5.6 displays, as a young woman holds her Mungo mask in her hand, in
a metropolitan pastel from 1795.103
A Calcutta performance of The Padlock is not recorded to take place until
early 1783, when a version of “the Comic Opera” was reported to be in
rehearsal.104 So this masquerader must have based his character on a London
Figure 5.6 John Raphael Smith, Young Lady with Negro Mask, c. 1795.
A black and white version of this figure will appear in some formats. For
the color version, please refer to the plate section
102
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Jul. 29–Aug. 5, 1780; Mar 17–24, 1785).
103
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Dec. 9–16, 1780).
104
India Gazette (Dec. 28, 1782). Since Messink was both the printer and the theater
manager, I am betting that this information is accurate. Unfortunately, there are no
extant issues of the paper covering the first nine months of 1783.

viewing of the play or its description in written or visual media of the period; it
could also refer to the Calcutta arrival of none other than Julius Soubise, the
“Mungo Macaroni,” in 1778. Mungo’s appearance offers a window on the
kind of transoceanic and transhemispheric crossings and exchanges – of
bodies, reports and practices – that maintained both Anglo-Indian identifica-
tions and their reinterpretation in local circumstances. Soon after this masked
ball, James Hicky appropriated Mungo’s transimperial role as the arbiter
and judge of scopophilic pleasure, adopting “Mungo” as his nom de
plume for reporting on the local ton and its activities, thus casting himself
as the ultimate British chameleon and world traveler, while also usurping
his privilege as purveyor of social truths.105 What kind of cultural work
could this character do in this frenetically theatrical town, which was in
the midst of a Hastings-led “orientalist” appreciation of Indian culture in
all its variety?
As previously noted, Governor-General Warren Hastings (1772–85)
had instituted an “orientalist” regime that sought to ensure that “British
sovereignty was exercised in Indian ways,” while exuding an atmosphere of
intellectual sympathy and even racial tolerance.106 Although accompanied
by plenty of military and imperial hubris and brutality, not to mention
continuous war with the Mahrattas, the regime brought diwani territories of
Bengal under control and incorporated Indian networks, experts and infor-
mation to compile law codes and translate Mughal and Sanskrit works of
statecraft, politics and literature into English, which arguably made Britons
the tools of Indians. The banians, or native merchants, orchestrated the
tone and tenor of British engagement with local culture and constructed
alternative urban spaces of sociability and business cheek by jowl with
supposedly exclusive White Town activities.107 To be sure, Hastings had
his critics: not least James Hicky and the Bengal Gazette, which were wont
to critique the administration under thinly veiled dramatic squibs, such as
The Bengal Escalapiad, a scurrilous attack on high-ranking officials, includ-
ing one called “Scrotum,” or a faux playbill for “A Tragedy call’d
TYRANNY IN FULL BLOOM . . . With the farce, All in the Wrong,”
the characters of which included Sir Francis Wronghead (Phillips), “Dildo
105
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Aug. 18–25, 1781). “Truth” was Hicky’s defense against his
prosecution by Hastings; hence his adoption of Mungo’s gaze is seen as authorizing the
substitution and proving his worth.
106
Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India (Cambridge, 2007). As
Travers has shown, Hastings’s modes of rule were part of a “wider pattern of crisis
management” in the aftermath of the Bengal famine of 1769–70 in which ten million
may have died.
107
Phebe Gibbes, Hartly House, Calcutta, ed. Michael Franklin (Manchester, 2019), xxiii–
xxv, xxiv; Chapter 1.

Whippersnapper, Justice Balance’s Footman” and “Irish Link Boys,” as

well as “Slaves, Train Bearers, Toad Eaters and Sycophants.”108
This historical moment provided the interesting backdrop for the arri-
val of Soubise. The freed slave, born in 1747 and brought to England by
a West Indian captain, he was raised as a son and heir by Catherine Hyde
Douglas, duchess of Queensberry, who lavished him with the education
and adornments of an aristocratic younger son. He attended Eton with his
mentor Domenico Angelo, an Italian fencing master, who took him to his
manège at Windsor, where he quickly mastered the art of horsemanship.
He also took elocution lessons with Thomas Sheridan: as Angelo recalled,
“Soubise was a great favorite of Garrick’s and the elder Sheridan give him
some lessons on elocution. He studied the speeches of Othello and
declaimed at the spouting clubs.”109 Eradicating his Caribbean “drawl”
was thus seen as essential to his inclusion in polite metropolitan society.
Illustrating the intersectionalities of race, class and gender in his public
notoriety as a “black fop,” Soubise seemed to live his life under the
shadow of the two theatrical characters whom the public used to define
him: Mungo and Othello. Indeed, Soubise was described early on in his
acquaintance with Queensbury as “an uncommonly smart and intelligent
little Mungo,”110 only to re-interpellate himself as “Othello,” expressing
the desire to become a general, or an actor – a choice that reveals powerful
attractions of the two subject positions that British social arrangements
seemed to authorize for non-white people. Performance or its represen-
tation remained central to Black British identity, whether in America or
India, in an empire where the military was the main acceptable form of
Black subjectivity, even as blackface characters began to populate English
drama.
In London in the 1770s, Soubise began to embrace that triad of upper-
class excess, gambling, clubbing and womanizing. He led a double life
with a secret apartment and mistress, and hosted extravagant dinners at
fashionable inns. A famous 1773 engraving of him by William Austin
portrayed Soubise fencing the duchess, with the caption “The D— of
playing at FOILS with her favorite LAP DOG MUNGO,” while below he
is saying, “Mungo here Mungo dere Mungo Every where above and
below. Hah! What you Gracy tink of me Now.” The dialect marks his
person as hybrid, and inferior, despite Sheridan’s lessons; and the stereo-
types of blackness were further reinforced when, in 1777, he was accused
of the rape of a servant woman in the Queensberry household. The
108
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Feb. 17–24, Jun. 16–23, 1781).
109
Henry Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo (London, 1828), vol. 1, 450–1. See also
Ashley L. Cohen, The Global Indies (New Haven, CT, 2020).
110
Angelo, Reminiscences, vol. 1, 446.

duchess hustled him off to Calcutta, where, taken under the wing of
Memory Middleton, a functionary in the EIC, he taught fencing before
establishing a riding school, and earned a large fortune both training
students and horses for the government, before he broke his own neck
in 1798 trying to break in a particularly wild Arabian horse.111
“Mr. Soubise” is noted for teaching “the Science of Fencing” at the
Harmonic Tavern in Calcutta in various notices in the local papers from
1781 to 1782. By the later years of the decade, he built and managed his
own manège, where Anglo-Indians could lodge or ride their noble
mounts, a business venture that seemed to flourish among fashionable
Calcuttans. In 1790, he took out an advert in the Calcutta Gazette asking
for “forbearance” as he recovered from rheumatism and informed “the
ladies and gentlemen of the Settlement at large that he . . . will wait their
commands every morning at the manége, and endeavor by his diligence
and attention to make up for his late absence.”112 Over the course of the
1780s and 1790s, we can track Soubise’s apparitional experience in
Calcutta as he became the foil for tawdry and salacious tales spun in the
local newspapers.113 The India Gazette’s column called The Monitor ran
an essay decrying the fads for French “refinements,” dancing and fashion
that had so dramatically altered Anglo society in Calcutta. Referring
obliquely to the arrival of “macaronis” from the metropole – and
Soubise being the most famous arrival – the writer suggested his own
traditional Anglo-Indian costume of embroidered velvet, gold lace and
crimson velvet breeches with gold garters became “a but to the shafts of
Macaroni ridicule” – probably referring to the premier Macaroni, Soubise
himself.114 This tantalizing link is reinforced by the writer going on to
suggest that Buffon himself – the French natural historian whose Histoire
Naturalle (1749) shaped classificatory thought about the varieties of
mankind for several generations – would be puzzled as to “what class to
put them [in],” since they seem to have been “sent . . . out in exchange for
the Monkies of Asia.”115
111
Morning Post (Jul. 22, 1777); Angelo, Reminiscences, 447–52. For Hicky’s railings against
such instances of “French refinement,” see Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Aug. 11–18, 1781).
112
Calcutta Gazette (Feb. 4, 1790). Soubise got his mentor’s treatise, School of Fencing,
published in the Chronicle’s press in 1796; India Gazette (Nov. 21, 1785); Domenico
Angelo, School of Fencing, cited in Graham Shaw, Printing in Calcutta to 1800 (London,
1981), 182; Calcutta Gazette (Aug. 18, 1796); Calcutta Chronicle (Feb. 21, 1792).
113
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Jan. 6–13, 1781; 27–29 Jul. 1782) (hours noted as TTH 7–
10:30, the only time it was possible to exercise in the heat of the summer).
114
James Cobb’s The Hurly Burly, or The Fairy of the Well (1785) had a “Blackamoor
Gallant” as his Harlequin; could Cobb, EIC secretary, be using Soubise in Calcutta as
a model? Larpent 715.
115
India Gazette (Feb. 24, 1781).

Another racist barb came from James Hicky, founder of Hicky’s Bengal
Gazette, the first English language newspaper in Bengal. As Hicky
announced in his paper of December 3, 1781,
The Managers of the Theatre having generously offer’d to give a Benefit play, to
Mr Soubise, toward the Completion of his Menage [sic] Mr. Soubise will appear
on that night in the character of Othello. And afterwards perform the part of Mungo
in the entertainment. Monsieur B[el]vere is preparing a new Dance, which, in
compliment to the occasion, is to be called the African Fandango – the part of Iago
wil be attempted by the Author of the Monitor [Messink], and Desdemona by
Mr. H[alhead] – a gentleman of doubtful Gender.
As Soubise’s alleged performance moved from the dangerous power of
Othello to the comically compromised Mungo, the threat of African sexual-
ity was contained, as Daniel O’Quinn has argued.116 But Hicky simultane-
ously casts doubt on the masculine pulchritude of all the men he surveys –
French dancing masters, EIC administrators such as Nathaniel Halhead,
who was known for eschewing conventional models of masculinity on the
stage and off, and Hicky’s rival, printer Barnard Messink, who was also actor
and manager of the Calcutta Theatre – all painted here as racially and
sexually other to the prerogatives and status of proper English masculinity.
Allegations of effeminacy had most often been directed against Indian men,
whose “long muslin dresses” and “gold ear-rings” gave the impression of
“an assembly of females.”117 Like the Indian men who milled about the
bazaars dressed in linen robes, Englishmen in India, or at least those at the
Calcutta Theatre, in Hicky’s view, had come to behave and appear like
women, contributing to the gender confusions and corruptions of the East as
these compromised masculinities provoked French attacks on Anglo-Indian
territories. Hicky’s attacks and unrelenting hostility, expressed in directing
dozens of thinly veiled squibs in the pages of his newspaper, caused him to be
thrown in jail, – from where he continued to denounce ministerial tyranny,
champion the bulwark against it provided by Liberty of the Press, and
uphold “the right and Capacity of the People to Judge of Government.”
Here, in this probably spurious announcement, the EIC, its personnel and
its allies are tarred with the brushes of failure and corruption, as failed gender
performances and venal governance reinforced each other.118 Not surpris-
ingly, Hicky had his press seized.
116
Daniel O’Quinn, “Theatre and Empire,” in CCBT, 233–46.
117
William Hodges, Travels in India, during the Years 1780, 1781 1782 and 1783 (London,
1794), 2–3. Mrs. Sherwood makes a similar remark about bearers dressed in muslin on
the Coromandel coast looking “like an assembly of ladies”: Life and Times of
Mrs. Sherwood, ed. F. J. Harvey Darton (London, 1910), 243.
118
Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Feb. 18); Nussbaum, Limits of the Human, 151–212; O’Quinn,
“Theatre and Empire,” 235.

A week later, the farce of High Life below Stairs was performed as
afterpiece to Congreve’s Way of the World, a pairing that again allowed
the audience to travel to distant colonial domains through the time warp
of English theatrical manners from London to the West Indies and back
again, appreciating the evolution in national taste from Restoration to
colonial comedy modes while underlining an increasing “social problem”
for Britons wherever they lived: how to find and keep appropriate
servants.119 Indeed, the performance of Townley’s farce, which rehearsed
the social and ontological crises created by servants behaving “out of
place” by aping their masters’ conspicuous consumption, whether inten-
tionally or not, highlighted the modern dimensions of the global, mixed-
race British servant class.120 The play sparked riots at the Edinburgh
theater, executed by the targets of the satire, the servants in the upper
gallery. In Calcutta, the servant problem also was becoming
a predicament. One writer railed against the “artifices” and “ill beha-
viour” of the “lower class of the natives” who work as servants:
There are, I believe, but very few, if any, gentlemen in India who have not, at one
time or the other, confessed and felt the truth of this observation; and it is
therefore the more astonishing, that some means have not been adopted to put
an effectual stop to the daily impositions and robberies committed on us, by those
whom we take into our services, and too often repose a misplaced confidence
in.121
If Indian servants were thieving and dishonest, Africans may have pre-
sented a surer bet. “Old Tom Coffree” used the occasion of High Life
below Stairs’ performance to reflect on his life as an enslaved African
working in the colony, an article that was undoubtedly a blackface imper-
sonation of Old Tom (if he existed) by Messink or Reed. Bought at Patna
in 1747, Old Tom was brought to Bengal by a ship’s captain, taught to
read and write by his master, and then, after his master was killed in the
Black Hole, he made a living playing his violin. He thus enacted a pattern
common to other urban spaces of the imperial provinces, where bands of
street musicians would also hire themselves out for formal occasions,
living as free servants always in search of masters. Old Tom Coffree
inverted the problem into one of finding worthy masters; his mistake
was not being “adopted” by a London aristocrat, as he fared much less
well than Soubise had done in Calcutta.122
119
High Life below Stairs was a favorite at the Calcutta Theatre through the 1780s: see, for
example, India Gazette (Apr. 4, 1786); Kristina Straub, “The Making of an English
Audience: The Case of the Footmen’s Gallery,” in CCBT, 131–44.
120
See Cohen, Global Indies, 78–100. 121 India Gazette (Sep. 22, 1782).
122
Calcutta Gazette (Apr. 7, 1785).

In the event, the enthusiastic response to High Life’s inversion comedy,

played before a “brilliant Audience,” for whom “the characters, both
male and female, were well-supported and received deserved applause,”
suggested an appetite for blackface comedy that would soon be satisfied,
the managers hoped, with a production of The Padlock, reported to be in
rehearsal on December 28, 1782 for production in early January 1783 – as
a benefit for the inhabitants of Fort St. George, currently under siege by
Haider Ally, the local bête noir (pun intended), before the record goes
silent.123 As with High Life, the part of the Black slave Mungo would be
played by a young white man, probably slight and agile, as the role
required (and which no doubt enabled Dibdin to best Moody, eighteen
years his senior). The appetite of locals for English theater, blackface or
not, had been borne out earlier in the year, when, in an example of life
imitating art that picked up on the themes of both High Life below Stairs
and The Padlock about over-reaching servants, the managers felt com-
pelled to raise prices of the gallery tickets: “the Managers of the Theatre,
finding that the present low price of the Gallery has been the means of
admitting all degrees of Black servants into that part of the House, in
order to prevent the intrusion of Such persons in future.”124 Evoking
unintentionally Orme’s own musings on the “gradations of slavery” on
the subcontinent, “race,” caste and class are here collapsed as the déclassé
“black” servant class, whatever its members’ origin or ethnicity, had to be
priced out of the theater so as not to debase the cultural capital of
participating in the storied British institution. This is one of the first
instances of attempted racial segregation mentioned in local sources;
even in “White Town,” British and Indians lived in close and intermixed
proximity.125 As the prestige of the theater rises, it simultaneously signals
an altered consciousness about the appropriateness of such mixing. The
theater takes the lead, even before the arrival of Cornwallis, in attempting
to segregate British social life and cultural production from that of local
peoples.
In the event, Mungo and Kingston each offered audiences an entrée
into shared concerns, such as the inability to get good help; on the other
hand, these performances also afforded the opportunity for differentia-
tion, as each site retained its own peculiar intermixtures of people that
comprised the servant class, some of whom were enslaved, and some of
123
India Gazette (Dec. 22, Dec. 28, 1782); Calcutta Gazette (Dec. 29, 1782). There are no
extant Gazettes for the first half of 1783.
124
India Gazette (Feb. 9, 1782). This is just before the production of School for Scandal,
discussed in Chapter 3.
125
Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial
Uncanny (London, 2006).

whom were not. The success of both plays also displays how representa-
tions of West Indian servitude and slavery could be made to serve the re-
territorialization of global space, at least in “East India” minds, one that
situated “real” slavery in the Atlantic world and so enabled slave-owning
Anglo-Indians to sympathize with but demur from their West Indian
counterparts.
A Short History of Indian Slavery

Unfreedom was the norm rather than the exception in the early modern
period across the world, as most scholars have recognized. Researchers
are familiar with the ledgers, accounts and private papers that make it
obvious that the ownership of people, and the treatment of people as
commodities, extended beyond formal slavery to the domains of labor,
migration, family life and colonization installed across the globe. Indeed,
ownership of women, slaves and subordinates – a wealth in people – gave
crucial strategic advantages in the struggles for power and place in colo-
nizing sites, which were also the sites of the first population censuses.126
These calculations and numerical assessments quickly become part of
a broader trend in governance, executed by masters and mistresses as well
as governors and councillors, that targeted realms of the intimate and
everyday in order to regulate polity and prosperity. Upon their ability to
“see like a state,” in other words, depended the reproduction of national
manners, the organization of coercive labor regimes, the exertion of moral
and intellectual suasion, and the imposition of social hierarchies among
their various charges, as the capitalist machine of empire turned virtually
all human activities, productive and reproductive, into potential sources
of profit, and chewed up the bodies in its purview – Indigenous, imported
and impoverished alike.127 Does this perspective erase the agency, sub-
jectivity or particularity of each suborned group? Of course not. Rather, it
provides solid evidence of the indispensability of coerced labor to making
the colonies of the New World and Old, creating pluriverses of transhemi-
spheric and cross-ethnic solidarities and tensions among proximate mem-
bers of this global laboring class.
This larger set of imperatives and contexts shaped how slavery and
“free labour” were defined by the eighteenth-century EIC, which, despite
significant differences in structure, practice and outcome, shared some
important and systemic commonalities with the regimes of the Atlantic
126
Kathleen Wilson, “Rethinking the Colonial State: Family, Gender and Governmentality
in British Frontiers,” AHR 116, 5 (Dec. 2011), 1294–322; Morgan, Reckoning with
Slavery.
127
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven, CT, 1998).

World. British Bengal was forthright in defining slavery as “work without

wages” and “free labour” as a “matter of contract” in its labor systems.128
Company directors had long recognized that “it is utterly impossible for
any European plantation to thrive upon any place between ye Tropix,
without ye assistance of the Negroes,” by which they meant slaves, and
they were joined by a variety of Southeast and South Asians trafficked
across the Company’s domains by European and Indigenous traders. All
the hard labor of settlement and factory-building of the EIC were done by
enslaved and convict labor.129 These enslaved workers arrived in
St. Helena, Sumatra, Calcutta and Bombay from Madagascar,
Malabar, the Gold Coast of Africa and the Caribbean, integrating the
slave systems of India and East Africa with those of the Atlantic world.
Enslaved men, women and children rode upon most, if not every, EIC
ship that carted people, goods and raw materials between Canton,
Calcutta, Madras, London and the Cape prior to 1770. The origins of
the enslaved could make a difference to their official treatment: the EIC
authorized various Malay and Malabar enslaved families from St. Helena
to retire “home” when they were too old to be of service; the same
kindness was not extended to African families, at least within the purview
of archives examined for this study.130 Mungo, Kingston and real-life
characters like Soubise or “Old Tom” each can provide a useful reminder
of the global dimensions of slavery in this period, resounding against the
often obscured history of slavery in East Indian domains, which under
British hands increasingly mixed Indigenous and Atlantic patterns.131
Forms of Indigenous slavery go back several centuries; enslaved peo-
ples from the markets of Persia, East Africa, Madagascar and Malabar, as
128
Peter Robb, Sentiment and Self: Richard Blechynden’s Calcutta Diaries 1791–1822
(Oxford, 2011).
129
IOR G/32/ Consultations, Court to St. Helena, Jun. 6, 1683; Richard B. Allen, European
Slave Trading in the Indian Ocean 1500–1850 (Athens, OH, 2014), 27–62;
Clare Anderson, “Transnational Histories of Penal Transportation: Punishment,
Labour and Governance in the British Imperial World, 1788–1939,” Australian
Historical Studies 47, 3 (2016), 381–97.
130
IOR G 35 St. Helena Consultations; see also Margot Finn, “Slaves out of Context:
Domestic Slavery and the Anglo-Indian Family, 1780–1830,” Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 19 (2009), 181–203; Pedro Machado, “A Forgotten Corner of the
Indian Ocean: Gujarat Merchants, Portuguese India and the Mozambique Slave Trade,
1730–1830,” Slavery and Abolition 24, 2 (2003), 26–27.
131
See, for example, Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843
(Liverpool, 2012); Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton, eds., Slavery and South
Asian History (Bloomington, IN, 2006); Finn, “Slaves out of Context”; Richard
B. Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the Abolition of Slave Trading
in India and the Western Indian Ocean 1770–1830,” WMQ 66.4 (2009), 873–94;
Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge, 2006);
Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in India (London, 1999).

well as the Sunda Islands (Indonesia), were distributed across Indian

Ocean space, incorporated into labor systems where slavery was used to
create a wealth in people, enlarge kin or otherwise expand connections
and domains.132 “Distress sales” was another route into slavery, as fam-
ine, debt or impoverishment forced people to sell themselves or family
members in order to escape starvation – a practice that allowed European
slave traders to justify their own purchases of slave cargos from famine
areas, often against the consent of those so sold.133 Some forms were
inheritable, some were not; under Indian custom, if a master proved
unable or unwilling to support his slaves, or the enslaved were able to
buy their way out, the relationship was dissoluble; but debt slavery usually
found the borrower slipping into inheritable slavery. Although not sub-
jected to the terrors of the middle passage and the various sorts of “social
death” it could generate, Indian slaves suffered from natal alienation and
loss of kin and connection and were subjected to considerable violence
from their masters. Sir William Jones’s address to a Calcutta grand jury in
1785 decried the “condition of slaves within our jurisdiction” as “beyond
imagination, deplorable . . . cruelties are daily practiced on them, chiefly
on those of the tenderest age and weaker sex,”134 and these included
floggings with rattans and slippers (the latter particularly insulting), pil-
lorying (obnoxious and shocking to local Hindus) and imprisonment in
cages.135 Anglo-Indians denied committing such barbarities against their
slaves, displacing the blame onto “that mongrel race of human beings
called Native Portuguese,” who commit “the barbarous and wanton acts
of more than savage cruelty daily exercised on the slaves of both sexes.”136
The apparent “willingness” of poor families to sell themselves or their kin
into slavery was thus used to demonstrate the “slavish nature” of the
Indian, rather than the rapacious practices and attitudes of the
Europeans.137 As Jones noted in his Grand Jury address of 1785,
“Hardly a man or woman exists in a corner of this populous town who
132
Eaton, “Introduction,” in Slavery and South Asian History, 8–11; Major, Slavery,
Abolitionism and Empire, 26–27; Kerry Ward, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in
the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge, 2009).
133
Eaton, “Introduction,” 6.
134
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Slavery and the Slave Trade in British India
(London, 1841), 29–30.
135
Henry Emsley Busteed, Echoes from Old Calcutta, 3rd ed. (Calcutta, 1897), 131–34. If
convicted for a more serious crime, the offender would be carried to prison in a 14-ft
high cage, perforated with airholes, to exhibit the miscreant to the populace – an
especially shaming ritual.
136
Calcutta Gazette (1809), quoted by Busteed, Echoes, 135.
137
The rapacious practices of the 1760s that had allowed EIC officials such as Lord Clive
and private traders to amass enormous fortunes through dubiously extracted “rents”
created the famine of 1769–70 in which ten million people died.

hath not at least one slave child, either purchased at a trifling price.”138
Peter Robb has argued that within the complex matrices of Indian society,
where virtually all labor was subcontracted by local bosses, “‘being
owned’” did not make slaves wholly distinct, in terms of family, caste,
or religion, from society at large.”139 As an alibi, the same could be said of
Atlantic societies, where even “limited property” in the ownership of
people, such as women, children and indentured servants, did not miti-
gate the hardships these groups had to encounter, or offset the continual
brutality directed toward the enslaved.140
More to the point here, the European presence and practices of mer-
cantile capitalism worked to alter the forms and nature of servitude on the
subcontinent. From the 1770s, the EIC’s official policy was to forbid
slave trading as strategically and morally abhorrent, while allowing slave-
holding as a “socially-embedded and benign institution.”141 Notices in
the English newspapers make it clear that buying and selling domestic
slaves was both widespread and socially accepted. Chattel slaves were
sold openly at auctions and through advertisements in the papers and on
handbills.142 Coffree and Malay slaves made up a small percentage of the
cargos in people that were trafficked, legally and illegally, across India in
the eighteenth century, but the British remained partial to African ser-
vants, and lovers. Indeed, British officials and traders, never ones to shun
ceremony, sought to emulate the elaborate rituals and display associated
with the Hindu and Mughal elites whose positions they had usurped, and
for whom having African slaves in the household was a mark of high
status.143 As Captain Thomas Williamson was still warning in his East
India Vade Mecum (1810), a householder needed thirty-nine different
138
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Slavery and the Slave Trade, 29–30. Jones
confirmed the large-scale appearances of women and children in boats and at bazaars
“most of them were stolen from their parents, or both, perhaps, for a measure of rice at
a time of scarcity.” Alexander Dow wrote in 1770 that the Hindustanis were a people
who did best when dominated by strong masters: “the languor occasioned by the hot
climate of India” inclined “the native to indolence and ease; and he thinks of the evils of
despotism less severe than the labour of being free.” Alexander Dow, The History of
Hindostan, 3 vols. (London, 1770), vol. 3, vii.
139
Robb, Sentiment and Self, 29.
140
Indentured servants were worse off than the enslaved by virtue of their temporary status;
they were known for finishing their terms in a “half-dead” condition. Wynter,
“Jonkonnu,” 35.
141
Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire, 70.
142
India Gazette (Dec. 12, 1785, advert for Malay runaway slave; Dec. 16–23, 1780, one ad
looking for “Coffresses” another for a “Coffree Slave Boy”); see also Busteed, Echoes,
130–33.
143
Allen, European Slave Trading. Eighty-seven percent of the enslaved in Bencoolen were
from Madagascar or West Africa (“Coffree”), of these 312 individuals, 78.5 percent
were Malagasy: see Appendix A, 221.

types of servants to run a well-ordered Anglo-Indian home, and these

would be a mix of African, Malay and Indian.144 But it is scarcely
a mitigating factor of that the majority of slaves were South or
Southeast Asians (“East Indians” in the parlance of the day).
In the period after the 1770s, cultural productions of the metropolis,
prints, stories and plays, chronicled the fact of Indian slave-holding and
attempted to distinguish between the foibles and follies of Indian versus
African slaves, as characters representing each faced off across metropol-
itan and provincial stages, and English commentators deliberated as to
which groups was more “slavish,” servile and amenable, which were
better workers, and which better bedmates.145 European’s muddled con-
cepts of caste, which they equated more or less unproblematically with
social hierarchies of “class,” also confused the status of the enslaved and
the rights of the masters over them.146 Equally detrimental in the long
term, EIC administrators and, after 1774, the British High Court in
Calcutta began to impose Atlantic World patterns on Indian slavery in
ways that changed Indigenous practice, legislating, for example, that
property in slaves was absolute, or that the children of enslaved women
also be enslaved, contrary to Muslim law and Hindu custom.147 The
scales of humanity and of tractability overlapped in the EIC’s labor
systems, making the lives of the enslaved of whatever ethnicity considera-
bly worse than they could have been otherwise.
To be sure, racial binaries were no more successful in India than in
the Caribbean: the Indian Ocean world boasted a wide spectrum of
skin tones, and religion, provenance, ethnicity, gender and caste were
all far more influential than skin color in determining status.148 Anglo-
Indians tried to adapt their language to signify these complexities,
distinguishing between local people as “blacks” (Hindus), “Moors”
(Muslims and North Africans) and “Coffrees” or sub-Saharan
Africans, a corruption of the Arabic word for nonbeliever. But, invari-
ably, British observers were drawn to the old black-and-white binaries
that collapsed complex ethnic groupings into a convenient polarity of
144
Thomas Williamson, East India Vecum (1810). Djangi says by the early nineteenth
century, wives of officials had to have European servants, but this probably meant
“Native Portuguese” or Indian Christians.
145
Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. Alfred Spence, 4 vols. (New York, 1923); as well as
Richard Blechynden, Eliza Fay and other letter writers were all clear that Indians were
“black.”
146
Nicholas Dirk, Castes of Mind (Princeton, 2001).
147
Indrani Chatterjee, “Colouring Subalternity: Slave, Concubines and Social Orphans in
Early Colonial India,” in Subaltern Studies X: Writing on South Asian History and Society,
ed. Gautam Bhadra, Gyan Prakash and Susie Tharu (Delhi, 1999), 71–84. The orphan
societies basically produced their own distinct types of lineage accounting (85–90).
148
Chatterjee and Eaton, “Introduction,” in Slavery and South Asian History, 5–10.

British and not-British.149 Ironically, British drama focusing on

Britons in India did much to advance, rather than alleviate, these
confusions about their identities and those of the people they were
attempting to rule. Mariana Starke’s Sword of Peace was written in
recollection of having lived in Calcutta as a youngster in the 1750s.
That it effaces Indigenous slavery when faced with representations of
Atlantic slavery and offers a misogynistic view of the Englishwomen
who traveled to the East in search of partners as little better than
prostitutes are both disruptive aspects of this comedy. Only “a pair of
white Englishwomen are found to have the style, sentiment and spirit
the play wishes to celebrate,” as Jeffrey Cox has dryly remarked.150
Starke made a point of liberating the enslaved character Caesar,
owned by the landlady, but the varieties of “blackness,” “brownness”
and shades in between are misrecognized or substitutable for each
other in this five-act antislavery comedy.151 Still, premiering at
Haymarket in August 1788, six months after the start of Warren
Hasting’s impeachment trial at Westminster Hall – cattily called the
great social event of 1788 by at least one pundit – Sword of Peace
continued theater’s self-appointed task of reviewing British treatment
of subaltern peoples around the empire begun the previous summer by
George Colman’s new comic opera Inkle and Yarico (1787). The
next year, EIC secretary James Cobb’s Love in the East; or,
Adventures of Twelve Hours (Drury Lane, 1788), set in Calcutta and
with scenes based on William Hodges’s drawings of the region,
boasted a Black Indian slave named Rosario – played in performance
by a young woman, Miss Romanzini – who also speaks in a dialect
distinguishable from the West Indian accent of Mungo by substituting
“v” for “w,” hereafter a symbol of southern and eastern rather than
western provenance that may have originated in St. Helena.152 Color,
149
This fact alone should caution us against accepting the notion that “race” was an
“Atlantic invention” as some Atlanticists have argued; see Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in
David Armitage and Michael Braddock, eds., The British Atlantic World (Basingstoke,
2001), 173–90.
150
Cox, “Introduction”; Mariana Starke, Sword of Peace (London, 1787), in Cox, Slavery,
Abolition and Emancipation.
151
[Mariana Starke ], The Sword of Peace (London, 1789); Cox, Slavery, Abolition and
Emancipation, 130–31. Starke’s play got six performances, Colman’s, nineteen. See also
John C. Leffel, “‘Where Woman, Lovely Woman, for Wealth and Grandeur Comes
from Far’: Representations of the Colonial Marriage Market in Gillray, Topham, Starke
and Austen,” in Monika Class and Terry F. Robinson, eds., Transnational England:
Home and Abroad 1780–1860 (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009), 208–32; Daniel O’Quinn,
Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London (Baltimore, MD, 2005), 290–91.
152
HEH Larpent 796; James Cobb, Calcutta, or Twelve Hours in India, later performed and
published as Love in the East: Or Adventures of Twelve Hours (1788). For St. Helena, see
Chapters 1 and 8.

dialect and movement all played a role in helping to parse who was
enslaved and who not, and who was likely to be a better worker, on
the stage, as in everyday life.
EIC officials took steps to limit slave trafficking in areas over which they
had power. Warren Hastings found the trade in children to be most
abhorrent and attempted to stop the practice of stealing children from
impoverished parents and selling them as slaves. In 1774 the Bengal
government passed regulations making it illegal to trade in persons with-
out a written deed and prevented the sale of any person not already in
a state of slavery. Admirable and prescient to be sure, but these regula-
tions aimed not at preventing British or Indians from holding, selling or
buying properly documented slaves but at preventing rival European
powers from rounding up non-slaves to sell them as such. Lord
Cornwallis, always eager to bolster Britain’s, and his own, reputation,
expressed interest in abolishing slavery altogether in all of the Company’s
territories, approving plans to emancipate the Company’s slaves at
Bencoolen and St. Helena in 1787 that did not come to fruition, and
then outlawing slave trading in Bengal by proclamation in 1789.153 The
proclamation of July 26, 1789, aimed to stop “many Natives and some
Europeans, in opposition to the Laws and Ordinances of this country
[British Bengal] and the dictates of Humanity” from “purchasing or
collecting Natives of both sexes, children as well as adult, for the purpose of
exporting them for sale as slaves in different parts of India or
elsewhere.”154 The proclamation does not mention the African or
Southeast Asian enslaved peoples who were continuing to toil for the
Company across its tropical domains. Subcontinental slavery, like slavery
across Southeast Asia, was thus already classified by British officials in
Bengal as a “local” custom – albeit one to which the British contributed –
that the Company could only attempt to regulate.155
The official condemnation of slave trading rubbed up against the other
imperative of governance, not to interfere in local customs and culture. It
also sat uneasily with regulations and ordinances designed to reign in
153
Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire, 70–90; Ravi Ahuja, “Labour Relations in Early
Colonial Context: Madras, c. 1750–1780,” Modern Asian Studies 36, 4 (2002), 804–05,
who notes that there were gangs of imported female slaves used in the fortification of the
works of Fort St. George; Allen, European Slave Trading. Additional proclamations
against slave trading were made in 1790 for Madras and 1792 for St. Helena. Major,
Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire, 53–55.
154
My emphasis. Calcutta Gazette (Jul. 26, 1789). Slavery was legally abolished in India in
1846 but continued into the twentieth century. The Company’s role in extending of
African slavery to India and other eastern domains remains under-explored.
155
Allen, European Slave Trading, notes that slave trade by the Company continued across
its domains after 1789.

British-Indian sexual relations. Most, if not all, EIC employees resident in

India took bibis or mistresses, who were frequently enslaved, who then
found themselves giving birth to their owner’s offspring. Under Muslim
law, such women’s children were ordinarily given freedom, but in British
Bengal, they were adjudicated into a system in which slavery became
heritable through the mother, in a repetition with a difference of
Atlantic patterns. This could have catastrophic consequences for the
individuals involved, as the case of Belinda – one of two enslaved
women, one African and one Bengali, brought back to Scotland by John
Johnstone, former governor of Bengal – showed in the 1770s. Belinda,
unbeknownst to Johnstone, was pregnant when she arrived; sometime
thereafter her baby died, and she was tried for infanticide, found guilty
and given a choice by a Scottish court to be hanged or sold to Atlantic
slave markets. Belinda’s mere presence in Scotland, of course, metonym-
ically represents the complex series of negotiated sovereignties and coer-
cions effected by the extension of British rule on the subcontinent.156 But
two more points deserve notice: if she had remained a slave in Bengal, and
not owned by an Englishman, she may have ascended to a higher family
position or even inherited property, whereas as a slave in a British house-
hold, she was destined to be sold again like the valuable commodity she
had once been, and the liability she became, in a sale of human flesh
sanctioned by the Scottish court. And secondly, within a decade it would
not have been possible for Belinda to be brought back to Scotland legally
because by an order of 1786 the Company had decreed that only children
and servants with two parents of European birth could be removed to
Britain, revealing, among other things, that human beings were one of the
few material products of empire that Britons did not want repatriated.157
Cornwallis’s 1789 proclamation against foreign slave trading in British
Bengal was interpreted by local audiences as essentially eradicating slav-
ery on the subcontinent. This move was celebrated by the theater man-
ager and playwright Francis Rundell, company surgeon, in a production
called Mungo in Freedom! Or Harlequin Fortunate, in 1792 – the script of
which has not survived, but its title implies a collapse of the difference
between slavery and slave trading in the Anglo-Indian consciousness and
156
Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires (Princeton, NJ, 2011), 87–90.
157
Sudipta Sen, Distant Sovereignty (London, 2002), 119–40. British, Dutch, French and
Portuguese traders trafficked in hundreds of thousands of African (as well as Asian)
slaves within and beyond the Indian Ocean basin from the early sixteenth to the mid-
nineteenth century: Richard Allen, “Suppressing a Nefarious Traffic: Britain and the
Abolition of Slave-Trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850,” WMQ 66, 4 (2009), 873–
94. For ads see, for example, Calcutta Gazette (Jun. 17, 1784), which notes that a “Malay
Slave Boy” had “eloped” dressed only in “white trousers and shirt with not waistcoat
shoes or hat,” “speaks a little English,” and had only been in Bengal four months.

a celebration of British Calcutta as an enlightened and advanced outpost,

where “real” slavery was abolished, despite the slave trading that contin-
ued and the enslaved African, Malay and Bugis who continued to toil for
the Company, in Bengal as elsewhere.158 The performance celebrated the
EIC’s abolitionist credentials, which seemed not to have been diminished
in local eyes by the slaves all around, who were claimed by Anglo-Indians
across the East Indies to be treated better by the British than they were by
Mughal, European, Sikh or Rejang masters. And, back in the metropolis,
Indian slavery did not figure as a problem in the many impassioned
speeches that accompanied the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings,
despite the fact that the periodic famines caused in part by EIC trading
practices would see the local bazaars stuffed with young women and
children for sale. Through these representations and elisions we can
also see how the discourses favoring abolition and emancipation, unfold-
ing in India as well as Britain, mobilized “increasingly public attempts to
clarify black inferiority,” as Felicity Nussbaum has pointed out, but then
attempted to attach Atlantic slavery’s commodification of blackness spe-
cifically to the African body.159
Condescending or demeaning attitudes toward African-descended
peoples exhibited by Anglo-Indians abound in the diaries that documen-
ted social life in Calcutta in this period, such as those of William Hickey,
Eliza Fay and Richard Blechynden, proceeding amidst and despite the
abundance of chromatic variations constituting British Bengal. Hickey’s
repulsion at “having” to sleep with a “black woman” (Bengali) was noted
in Chapter 2; neither was he above a witticism on the local racial motley.
Hickey named his Calcutta-acquired, Black African slave “Nabob,” took
him to England dressed in finery and allowed his father to educate and
Christianize him. He was much surprised when Nabob “betrayed” his
generosity by plumping to go back to a former master in Calcutta but not
before notifying a bailiff of Hickey’s presence in the metropolis.160 Fay’s
mistreatment of her East Indian enslaved “black” servant, leaving her to
her landlady in lieu of payment, got her arrested in St. Helena.161
Blechynden’s relation to slavery was both direct and oblique: he had
several house servants, of whom at least one was someone else’s slave,
and was in contact with the enslaved who worked in the households of
some of his friends, probably Indo-Portuguese, as many of the servants
and slaves of European Calcutta were; others were Hindus and Muslims
158
Calcutta Gazette (Jul. 26, 1789).
159
Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, vol. 10, Speeches in the Impeachment of
Warren Hastings Esquire (London, 1887); Nussbaum, “Theatre of Empire,” 55.
160
Hickey, Memoirs, vol. 2, 239–46, 292–93; vol. 3, 150–52.
161
Eliza Fay, Original Letters from India, ed. E. M. Forster (New York, 1925), 175–77.

of local or “up-country” provenance. Blechynden left thousands of pages

of diaries that charted his course as an architect, builder and surveyor in
Calcutta in the 1790s, eventually serving as superintendent of roads,
which integrated his professional and personal lives. His diaries show
his propensity to use local women for sex, both within and outside his
own household, occasions memorialized by female symbols in his diary (a
practice that, similarly deployed by Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica,
seems to have swirled across colonial boundaries).162 But Blechynden’s
diary also provides the only first-hand account we have of Julius Soubise’s
complicated sojourn in Calcutta in the 1790s, where he had become head
of a manège only after trying out other professions, such as fencing
master, suitable to his aristocratic upbringing. Soubise was also fre-
quently in debt, joining other Anglo-Indians in Calcutta in being placed
at the mercy of the Calcutta lawyers and bankers.163 Soubise may have
been one of the first modern Black Britons to be embraced as “British” in
Bengal and the empire, and he was certainly accepted in polite circles.164
Blechynden suggests, however, that this acceptance was both reluctant
and conditional. He disapproved of mixed-race marriages in general,
although his bibi (whose name is never revealed in his diary) bore him
several children about whom he cared a great deal.165 Blechynden still
seemed to find other people’s mixed-race children, particularly those of
the Indo-Portuguese, to be especially monstrous: he described the
children of a friend who had come to visit him, offspring of the
Englishman and an Indo-Portuguese woman, as “ugliness personified
and had only one eye.”166 Soubise’s status as a Black Briton – an ex-
slave from British Caribbean domains – did not seem to do much to raise
him above this level. Having heard in April 1794 that Soubise was to
marry Calcutta councilman Mr. William Pawson’s daughter, Blechynden
blurted out “I had seen so much of human nature that I was Surprized [sic]
at nothing and that this Country is famous for extraordinary Marriages,”
a reference to the famous cross-generational, cross-race liaisons within
this colonial space.167 Three months later, Pawson appeared at
Blechynden’s dinner table, where he reportedly said,
162
Durba Ghosh, “Decoding the Nameless: Gender, Subjectivity, and Historical
Methodologies in Reading the Archives of Colonial India,” in Wilson, New Imperial
History, 297–316.
163
Peter Robb, “Credit, Work and Race in 1790’s Calcutta: Early Colonialism through
a Contemporary European View,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 37, 1
(2000), 2; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, CT, 1992), 66–68.
164
Cohen, Global Indies. 165 Ghosh, “Decoding the Nameless,” 297.
166
MS 45590, Aug. 22, 25, 26, 1794.
167
See, for example, William Dalrymple, White Mughals (London, 2004). Robb, “Credit,
Work and Race,” notes the marriage of Blechynden’s sixty-seven-year-old Calcutta

I suppose you know my Daughter is married to Soubise [Pawson said] he took me

so unawares that I inadvertently answered I had heard so but scarcely knew how to
believe it. He seemed to feel it for he instantly said that he himself scarcely knew
how to believe it . . . then enquired if Black people did not marry white People in
England, etc. etc.168
Metropolitan acceptance of cross-racial marriage was meant to banish
any dishonor attached to the act in a colonial context. But Blechynden’s
future dealing with Pawson and Soubise himself did nothing to eradicate
the impression that the marriage was a source of shame. When Soubise’s
young daughter died of a bowel obstruction, Blechynden blamed it on
“some Malay bitches of nurses” who had given the mother drugs; when
Blechynden gossiped with other towns people, the men assumed the
daughter had been pregnant when married, that is, that “the Coffree
screwed her up tight.” Myths, jokes and squibs of African sexual potency
continued to be directed at the Soubises, and Mrs. Soubise found her
name in the paper after ordering a case of claret from a local wine
merchant and, allegedly, refusing to pay for it: the wine had been “guzzled
down by Soubise and his Gang” as Blechynden noted (here appropriating
the theatrical criminality of Macheath and his gang from Beggar’s Opera
[1728], which remained one of the most popular plays in the colonies,
even of the EIC, which was in the 1780s accused of being precisely such
a gang).169 Soon Blechynden was in charge of the design and building of
a new manège for Soubise. He recorded,
Arose at Gun-fire and Rode . . . to Soubises’s he was not up – but I got a man to
shew me the Ground-took a ride around the Esplanade . . . [had breakfast] then to
Soubise’s found Pawson there dined with him, his Daughter and Soubise –
a Black boy that squints and a Coffree daughter of Soubise’s – a Curious
Collection! Mrs Soubise[’s] Bosom ornamented with a Portrait of Soubise!
Othello and Desdemona – I pity poor Pawson – yet he seems quite happy.170
Clearly, the theatrical commendation of the Soubises’s cross-race union
did little to offset Blechynden’s discomfort with the cultural and racial
mentor, Edward Tiretta, to a fourteen-year-old girl in 1793 (4). Marriage of young

women to much older men was part of the colonial social scape, a means of raising cash
and status, among other things.
168
Add MSS 45, 589, Apr. 18, 1794; Add MSS 45,590, f. 99, f. 99r, Jul. 1, 1794.
Peter Robb has been the most thorough in documenting Blechynden’s life; see his
fascinating volume, Useful Friendship: Europeans and Indians in Early Calcutta (Oxford,
2014).
169
Add MSS 45, 590, f. 99v, Jul. 1, 1794. Pawson was on the council and so was an actor at
the theater: in 1795, Blechynden records “Pawson dined at the Theatre where he plays
this evening the part of Isaac Fungus in The Commissary.” Add MSS 45, 592, Jan. 5,
1795.
170
Add MSS 45, 591, f. 45v. Oct. 13, 1794.

motley of the Soubise household. (That Soubise had a “natural daughter”

in Bengal is noteworthy, showing that he had become an Englishman in
India after all.) Indeed, Blechynden’s diary reveals that the Soubise
household served as a social center for several mixed-race families and
their children, displaying the full varieties of a British-imputed “black-
ness,” yet all of whom seemed to think themselves part of a larger British
project.171 The clash of perceptions, identities and practices were the
stuff out of which local hierarchies were made. “[F]ound Soubise and
Pawson’s Daughter (for I cannot think her his Wife) angling in the Tank
but they caught nothing,” Blechynden wrote the next day. In 1797,
Soubise had to withdraw from commercial and social life due to a bad
case of rheumatism. Blechynden’s meeting with him once he reemerged
in public view went as follows:
Soubise came in a perfect Caricature – his legs and thighs entirely wasted so that
another leg might be slipped behind his into the Boot – says he has had the
Rheumatism but has been cured by Mercury.172
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune could clearly fly in all

directions, as the Afro-Caribbean Soubise – brought up as an aristocratic
gentleman only to be forced to a colonial outpost along with other
felons,173 whose body had always been a subject of scrutiny and carica-
ture, and who was now in fact reduced to the form of his many lampoons,
with a clear implication of venereal disease – lived through multiple forms
of social intolerance, distrust and disparagement, even in his nominal
inclusion. In what was hopefully a show of sympathy for his widow, while
he declined in health, the Calcutta Theatre put on a benefit for
Mrs. Soubise, staging Sophie Lee’s Chapter of Accidents, a Haymarket
production of 1780 that raised eyebrows for its ridicule of the rites of
defloration that were so essential to British matrimony, even suggesting
that the oft-proclaimed chastity of Englishwomen was largely
performative.174 The Mungo Macaroni and his English wife could not
overcome the association of African blackness with lasciviousness and
deceit, as well as inferiority, servitude and slavery, phantasma that were
never far from the minds of Anglo-Indians when confronted with African
“equals.”
171
Add MSS 45, 591, f. 64V. 172 Add MSS 45603, c. 1797, f. 14.
173
No mention is made by Blechynden of the charges against Soubise, so it is possible he
did not know of them.
174
Asiatic Mirror and Commercial Advertiser (Mar. 7, 1798). For the play, which was based
on Diderot’s Le Pére du Famille see Catherine Boroughs, “British Women Playwrights
and the Staging of Female Sexual Initiation: Sophia Lee’s The Chapter of Accidents
(1780),” Romanticism on the Net 23 (Aug. 2001). The play’s father figures are openly
allied with misogyny and racism, leaving the young people to support their opposites.

Back to Mungo
The dialect-speaking West Indian Mungo, then, acquired new and spe-
cific kinds of abolitionist resonances as well as novel connotations of
foppish Black masculinity in a distant and distinct colonial milieu,
which were then put to work to delimit the mores and foibles of local
society. As a blackface white man impersonating an enslaved Afro-
Caribbean in a subcontinental Anglo-Asian setting, Mungo confirmed
the privilege of white Britons performing their “others” in the course of
daily life, appropriating local customs, renaming spaces and enacting
practices through which their compulsion to become the other could be
instrumentalized into forms of rule. At the same time, the “character” of
Mungo – that “ethnographic” copy whose ability to give pleasure far
exceeded that of the “original” – recalibrated the transnational codings
of racial and national identities, even of abolitionism itself, providing
pretexts for new strategies of control and demarcation. As the varieties
of blackness and of slavery paraded themselves through the streets and
daily life of Calcutta, they solicited and supported the awareness of both
a humanitarianism that recognized that forms of “blackness” and servi-
tude were universal, crossing all sorts of gender, ethnic and racial scales,
and a more particular understanding of enslavement that was particular
to the region and susceptible to new strategies of household management
and national reproduction in transcolonial settings. That the African-
Caribbean and British refugee Soubise (who identified with aristocratic
mores and so may have seen sex with female servants as an entitlement)
should end up in Calcutta was perhaps an unintended irony; but his and
Mungo’s roles in anchoring the construction of an emergent syncretic
racial regime are no less important for that.
As Soubise’s mimic man, and vice-versa, Mungo was also a way of
providing comic relief and exculpation to a situation that was frequently
one of life and death – namely, servitude on the subcontinent. Anglo-
Indians had long agreed among themselves that they were superior in
“genius” to denizens of other British settlements of either east or west,
and their antislavery stance bolstered that reputation, at least to
themselves.175 Enabling Anglo-Indians to participate in the “universal”
abhorrence of Atlantic slavery, while deflecting attention away from the
ubiquitous Indigenous and hybridized forms of servitude that were
enacted all around them, Mungo came to symbolize a form of oppression
that, although endlessly analogized, was not seen as reflecting upon
Anglo-Indian practice, where if slavery was recognized to be a problem,
175
India Gazette (Jan. 13, 1781); Calcutta Gazette (Nov. 18, 1790).

it was an Indian one that was beyond the control of the colonial autho-
rities. Hence, an article by “a Friend to Liberty” in the newly minted
Oriental Magazine, or Calcutta Amusement (1785) decries slavery as
a crime, yet never mentions slavery in India. In keeping with this apparent
displacement, when the Calcutta Theatre put on its second recorded
performance of The Padlock (December 21, 1786), it seemed to elicit
a collective catharsis that was much needed in the wake of metropolitan
disapproval of Britons’ subcontinental escapades. Mungo “kept the
house in a perpetual roar of laughter; we have seen this character with
less pleasure even at the Theatre Royal,” a reviewer recorded in the India
Gazette.176 The dialect-speaking West Indian could thus be seen to
exempt Indian slavery from international abolitionism’s gaze. It is appro-
priate, then, that The Padlock should take on an additional layer of
meaning when a young lady from St. Helena demonstrated that women
in the Hastings era could become Mungo figures themselves, challenging
the dominant strictures that would keep them confined.
The young lady in question was Emma Wrangham Bristow, who had
been stirring the cultural cauldrons of Calcutta since 1780. Wrangham’s
version of British womanhood provides an excellent and early example of
the kind of “female masculinity” that would be both lauded and feared in
Britain during the Revolutionary decade of the 1790s; locally, “the
famous filly of St. Helena,” laughed and danced on the broken hearts of
her admirers.177 As Sophie Goldborne described her, she was character-
istic of Calcutta women in being “obliging and informing, . . . and sweetly
sympathy[etic],” one moment and the next, “so little attentive to female
decorum, and so fearless of danger, that . . . to drive a phaeton and pair
with a vivacity, a dégagement, . . . to mark their skill and unconcern, in the
midst of numberless spectators, is their delight.”178 Her “natural flow of
spirits frequently led her into extravagancies and follies of rather too
masculine a nature,” William Hickey agreed:
she rode like a man astride, would leap over any hedge or ditch that even the most
zealous sportsmen were dubious of attempting. She rode several matches and
succeeded against the best and most experienced jockeys. She was likewise an
excellent shot, rarely missing her bird; understood the present fashionable science
176
India Gazette (Dec. 21, 1786).
177
St. Helena ladies were famous in East Indian circuits for their androgynous charms: the
charming and vivacious Lady Coote was a St. Helena product, and Emma’s younger
sister Anne married an EIC captain on St. Helena on his way to Calcutta, reflecting the
outposts’ continuing importance in cementing global connections. Busteed, Echoes,
127–29.
178
Kathleen Wilson, “Nelson’s Women: Female Masculinity and Body Politics in the
French and Napoleonic Wars,” European History Quarterly 37 (2007), 562–85;
Gibbes, Hartly House, Calcutta, 40.

of pugilism and would without hesitation knock a man down if he presumed to

offer her the slightest insult.179
The private theater at their Chowringee house, built with her adoring
husband’s support, marked one of the first times actresses appeared on
any Calcutta stage.180 On an October night in 1789, Mrs. Bristow, as she
then was, she took on the roles of the female leads in two of Bickerstaffe’s
inventions, The Sultan – in which a pert young English girl single-
handedly dismantles the despotic power of an Ottoman prince and his
harem – and The Padlock, where said miss foils patriarchy and slavery
alike. In each case, “Every expectation was exceeded,” the Calcutta
Gazette exulted, and Wrangham’s Leonora combined the “allurements
of innocence and harmony . . . [and] the most captivating influence of
eloquence and modulation of look and manner.” With Captain Gladwin
cross-dressed to play the Duenna and the young writer William Bird,
unofficial “Master of the Revels” in Calcutta who supplied the music for
the first printing of Indian music for British residents, filling in as Mungo,
the performance was described as “perfect in its kind” and “a feast of
reason and a flow of soul,” quoting Pope.181
Wrangham’s performances of female masculinity are embellished
rather than diminished by her turn as these Boadicean women – just as
the credentials of the St. Helena native as “English” are bolstered by her
convincing portrayal of Englishwomen. In character as Roxalana from
The Sultan, Wrangham’s epilogue evoked the actor’s steely core behind
the character: “I Roxalana do this act decree / And where’s the Turk who
dares dispute with me,” she quipped, praising the audience for their taste
and pleasure, before warning “Mind well the Treaty – and for War
prepare” – a timely reminder of the tensions within the local polity that
extended from EIC relations to hostile Mysore warriors and their leader,
Tipu Sultan, to the British imperial government.182 But she also
reminded the local ton that white women’s cultural influence and power
in Calcutta could be formidable. Hence, as Mungo’s empirical and
symbolic presence in India successfully spatialized the horrors of slavery,
in all its analogies, to the Atlantic world, Wrangham vindicates the East as
a space where Englishwomen could flourish, entertain, and civilize, reca-
librating yet again the gender and racial transgressions of the
179
Busteed, Echoes, 128n; Hickey, Memoirs, vol. 3, 377.
180
They had appeared at a benefit at the Madras theater: Busteed, Echoes, 129. Rundell also
hired actresses for the theater season of 1784, so the two may have overlapped.
181
Calcutta Gazette (Oct. 22, 1789). The review also credits the singing of the characters,
which, as indicated earlier, was crucial to the success of The Padlock.
182
Calcutta Gazette (Oct. 22, 1789); for reports on Tipu being nearby, see Calcutta Gazette
(Oct 15, 1789).

subcontinent. Her performances as actor or as gun-toting, riding-astride

young woman usurped the prerogatives of white masculinity, installing
herself as the colony’s premier mimic man, a stand-in not only for “real”
actresses or Englishwomen but also for the distinctly masculine hubris
that allowed to her to slip into an array of unauthorized roles. Sir Philip
Francis, precocious architect of the (future) Permanent Settlement,
inveterate foe of Hastings, member of the Supreme Council of Bengal
and friend of the French revolutionaries, bumped into Mrs. Bristow at the
opera in London in 1796 and remarked that he had turned his attention
and care from “Hindoos to negroes” once back in England. “What signify
negroes?,” Bristow was reported to respond. “Aren’t they black? And
don’t I make a slave of every man I meet?”183
Wrangham thus expressed an Anglo-Indian social vision in which
“blackness” was both a part of everyday life and the ground zero of
servitude. Wrangham considered all of her subordinates as “blacks,”
whether Moor, Hindu, Coffree or, indeed, male, even as her performance
in The Padlock continued to make West Indian slavery available for
subcontinental consumption and exculpation, using Mungo to set the
seal on the fictive regional divisions of slavery and freedom that are still
with us today. As with the performance of Mungo in Freedom, or Harlequin
Fortunate later in 1792, The Padlock’s continuing performance in Calcutta
established the residents’ bona fides as antislavery advocates, while allow-
ing daily life to go on as before, entirely dependent upon servants that
included the enslaved.184 From this premise, slavery would not be abol-
ished formally in India until a decade or so after the abolition of slavery in
the “British empire” of 1833, that is, in 1846, although it continued until
the end of the nineteenth century. How did blackface fare among the
British convicts transported to New South Wales who repeatedly decried
their plight as worse than slavery? That is the subject of the next chapter.
183
Busteed, Echoes, 215n.
184
India Gazette (Feb. 11, 1782); Oriental Magazine; or Calcutta Amusement (1785), 118–
19, where a letter on the importance of abolitionism doesn’t even mention India.

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5 Blackface Empire: or, the Slavery Meridian

Mungo here, Mungo dere,

. . . an extravagant and wheeling stranger

I must apologize for reminding the reader so often, of the gradations

In nature, “whiteness” nowhere exists; it must be produced by artful

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Robin D. G. Kelley (New York, 2012); Kathleen McKendrick, “Plantation Futures,”

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compound ideas were adapted to and instrumentalized across different

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softened in abolitionist discourse, and refurbished in ever more exclu-

Blackface As Stage Practice

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societies’ ways of wielding these powerful yet impossible designations,

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On stage, masks, costumes and the theatrical practice of “corking up”

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initial response to seeing Samuel Foote appear onstage as Othello, in

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786317.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Figure 5.1 John Rich in The Necromancer, 1753

practices.”18 Older patterns of meaning attached to blackness continued

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on to negotiate race relations over the next century in sometimes sympa-

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having –to the environment, to labor, to white “civilization” generally, –

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play or to violence. Blackface, a stage practice that authorized white British

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786317.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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marginalized from white masculine privilege – on the stage and off

Figure 5.2 Mr. Dibdin in the Character of MUNGO in the Celebrated

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an “English” product, an Inuit woman from Labrador Coast attended

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Not surprisingly, a number of plays and pantomimes both prepare for

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786317.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

play on a rising anxiety about the presence of Blacks in London and

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. . . O sons of freedom! equalise your laws,

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enslaved in Jamaica, Moody was in rehearsal playing Mungo when it was

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https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108786317.007 Published online by Cambridge University Press

triumphal Blackness.59 Hence, the politics of subjectivity on Jamaica

Blackface in the Black Colony

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As the paraphrase from Hamlet reveals, provinciality need not circum-

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emulation. White men never tired of rhapsodizing about the “coloured

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including the alternative deﬁnitions of who was “property” and who

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hard not to read into this convergence an acknowledgement of “people of

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Signiﬁcantly, the duke of Clarence was equally moved to avail himself

Figure 5.4 James Gillray, WOUSKI, 1787