Between 1833 and 1841 the Children’s Friend Society, a London-based philanthropic organization, sent some eight hundred children from England to the Cape, where they were apprenticed to local settlers. This article focuses on two of them: Alfred Brooks, aged thirteen or fourteen, and twelve-year-old Elizabeth Foulger. Both of these children appear in archival traces because they transgressed and were subsequently disciplined by their masters. The article argues that a series of binaries shaped these young migrants’ lives: between infant and adult, black and white, and colonizer and colonized. The in-between status of the CFS apprentices had the potential to disrupt increasingly rigid hierarchies at the colonial Cape, during a time of significant social and political turmoil. The context of slave emancipation, as well as concerns over juvenile delinquency in London, affected these children’s experiences. Concerns over their categorization illustrate the complicated range of positions that migrant workers in the British empire could hold beyond simply ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. Thinking through the position of these young white emigrant workers in the post-emancipation Cape sheds light on the fragility of classed, gendered, racialized, adult and free identities in that context.
{"title":"Children In Between: Child Migrants from England to the Cape in the 1830s","authors":"R. Swartz","doi":"10.1093/HWJ/DBAA034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/HWJ/DBAA034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Between 1833 and 1841 the Children’s Friend Society, a London-based philanthropic organization, sent some eight hundred children from England to the Cape, where they were apprenticed to local settlers. This article focuses on two of them: Alfred Brooks, aged thirteen or fourteen, and twelve-year-old Elizabeth Foulger. Both of these children appear in archival traces because they transgressed and were subsequently disciplined by their masters. The article argues that a series of binaries shaped these young migrants’ lives: between infant and adult, black and white, and colonizer and colonized. The in-between status of the CFS apprentices had the potential to disrupt increasingly rigid hierarchies at the colonial Cape, during a time of significant social and political turmoil. The context of slave emancipation, as well as concerns over juvenile delinquency in London, affected these children’s experiences. Concerns over their categorization illustrate the complicated range of positions that migrant workers in the British empire could hold beyond simply ‘free’ and ‘unfree’. Thinking through the position of these young white emigrant workers in the post-emancipation Cape sheds light on the fragility of classed, gendered, racialized, adult and free identities in that context.","PeriodicalId":46915,"journal":{"name":"History Workshop Journal","volume":"91 1","pages":"71 - 90"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/HWJ/DBAA034","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46471782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Looking at the casebooks kept by the early modern astrologer-physician Richard Napier, this article offers a close reading of cases in which he linked his patients’ ‘madness’ to their recent childbearing. Exploring this linkage, it engages with a longstanding historiographical debate about the relationship of culture, corporeality, and subjective embodiment. Napier’s ideas about childbirth-related mental ill health were profoundly gendered, and we cannot begin to understand them without studying the early modern gendering of planets, seasons, flesh, and blood. Contemporaries’ constructions of sex difference, in particular, underline the distance between their phenomenology of bodies and our own. Yet reading the case histories of these patients can give rise to impressions of familiarity, as well as strangeness. The article asks how historians should interpret the parallels between present-day understandings of childbirth-related health risks and those described in early modern England. It argues that we need to develop historical methodologies which allow room for both culture and the ‘extra-cultural’, even if we cannot separate out the two for scrutiny.
{"title":"Childbirth, 'Madness', and Bodies in History","authors":"Philippa Carter","doi":"10.1093/HWJ/DBAB004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/HWJ/DBAB004","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Looking at the casebooks kept by the early modern astrologer-physician Richard Napier, this article offers a close reading of cases in which he linked his patients’ ‘madness’ to their recent childbearing. Exploring this linkage, it engages with a longstanding historiographical debate about the relationship of culture, corporeality, and subjective embodiment. Napier’s ideas about childbirth-related mental ill health were profoundly gendered, and we cannot begin to understand them without studying the early modern gendering of planets, seasons, flesh, and blood. Contemporaries’ constructions of sex difference, in particular, underline the distance between their phenomenology of bodies and our own. Yet reading the case histories of these patients can give rise to impressions of familiarity, as well as strangeness. The article asks how historians should interpret the parallels between present-day understandings of childbirth-related health risks and those described in early modern England. It argues that we need to develop historical methodologies which allow room for both culture and the ‘extra-cultural’, even if we cannot separate out the two for scrutiny.","PeriodicalId":46915,"journal":{"name":"History Workshop Journal","volume":"91 1","pages":"29 - 50"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/HWJ/DBAB004","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46549755","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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