Accessibility and Archives: “May we never be popular in bad times”
Given that our general education may have under-focused on both disability history and histories of European colonialism, it may not be obvious how they intersect. This blog is intended to start re-integrating decolonial approaches to history (decentring the mainstream European perspective) with disability history. It also surfaces the abolitionist activism of disabled people.
Europeans participating in the ages of exploration and empire were at risk of temporary or permanent disablement themselves and the cause of disablement in others (through colonial violence and infection). Jenifer L Barclay’s 2021 book The Mark of Slavery discusses disability and enslavement in an American context, but accidents, punishment, disease and trauma would also have been part of the plantation experience of enslaved people elsewhere and at other times. She also notes that the Jim Crow character of blackface minstrelsy stereotypes and mocks the disabled experience as well as race – tying both together with the same logic as insurers ascribing impairment to all African Americans. In an earlier blog in this series, we saw that the ‘monster’ vocabulary used of Caliban in The Tempest had already imagined him as a disabled person, as well as a person of African heritage enslaved, exploited and tricked by white settlers. Scientific racism may postdate Shakespeare but some of its poisonous ideas were nonetheless present as ideas of race were being made: that people who don’t have white skin are ugly, intellectually inferior, suited to physical labour (but lazy and needing physical punishment) and a threat to white women.
Elsewhere in this play, a European character explicitly imagining the “plantation of this isle” offers a contemporary critique of European civilisation in the age of exploration by presenting as his own vision of a better ordered world, ideas derived from Montaigne’s essay on ‘The Cannibals’. This proposed that civilisations of the Americas were living examples of a Platonic golden age. The playhouse audience would likely not have been aware, but Gonzalo’s source was seemingly drawing on the perspective and testimony of Tupinambá (Brazilian) visitors to the France of Charles IX in 1562[1]. Shockingly (for archivists), the idealisation of their culture is related to the absence of writing and contracts that were (and are) part and parcel of unequal European societies characterised by what Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko would later assert were “principles so false that honest men could not live amongst them”.
Montaigne had suggested that eating the cooked flesh of dead people was less barbaric than European treatments of living enemies, neighbours and fellow-citizens “under colour of piety and religion” (e.g. punishments like racking, or burning at the stake). Shakespeare’s characters are similarly inclined to link the child-killing atrocities of the opposing sides in the Wars of the Roses as akin to, or worse than, the behaviour of cannibals. In 1610, it would be the English settlers of Jamestown who would be driven by desperation to dig up and eat the flesh of their recently dead neighbours[2].
At that very time, thousands of miles away from both Europe and Virginia, a Quecha nobleman of Peru was writing (in Spanish) a 1189-page chronicle to be sent to Philip III of Spain. This includes a passage on disability inclusion explicitly claiming superiority over all other kingdoms, Christian or pagan. The writer notes that there disabled people “did not need a hospice or alms” (such as was offered in Europe) because they were valued for what they could do and given assistance to do what they could not. While there is talk of disabled people being used for entertainment (a role which would have been familiar to European readers), it also stresses that individuals with matching disabilities were married to each other. While we might question how much free will they had, it is important to remember that In Montaigne’s European world, disabled people could, proverbially, offer the non-disabled “the perfect pleasure of Venus” (an idea which does not imply consent, and which is more suggestive of the paraphilia of devotism than marriage).
Benjamin Lay (1682-1759) was exposed to (and changed by witnessing) the realities of enslavement in both Barbados and Pennsylvania. As Nathaniel Smith Kogan has argued, Lay was aware that being “very unfit almost every way, as a Man” he was deemed “very mean and contemptible in the sight of Men, almost in every respect”. As a widower, he chose an ascetic, self-sufficient lifestyle that ensured he was able to boycott produce from plantations. He dedicated himself to challenging the legitimacy of slave-holding, and its progenitor Greed, in print and in person (including with unpopular activist stunts). In describing Covetousness as a “cursed, ugly, hateful, damned piece of Deformity, and Mother Midwife, and Nurse of Enormities”, it seems he was attempting to redirect the language used about his own physical appearance at the inner spiritual corruption of those who profited from enslavement.
The blindness of Edward Rushton (1756-1814, pictured in the preview image) was a direct result of an eye infection contracted on a voyage to Dominica as a teenage apprentice in the colonial era merchant navy. His subsequent advocacy of universal human rights (including the emancipation of the enslaved) was not calculated to win him friends in his home city of Liverpool, a port of empire where, as the actor George Frederick Cooke (who features in this blog) had noted, in a drunken riposte to hecklers, in 1785 “every brick… is cemented with an African's blood”. He deemed his own countrymen “the oppressors of mankind” and insisted that “as the great mass of the British people are the advocates and supporters of their government, they of course partake of the guilt, and should share the censure.” He pointed to the hypocrisy of those (like George Washington, John Horne Tooke and Wiliam Cobbett) who were advocates of rights and freedoms only of those who were like themselves, and argued that when national wealth and power depended on “pillage and slavery… then the names of patriot and plunderer ought to be synonymous.” Subject to “threatening letters, insults and even outrages” Rushton was nonetheless content to be subject to the opprobrium heaped on a consistent advocate of the oppressed (see the subtitle of this blog), given that “there are numbers in the world whose approbation I should deem the severest censure.”
The words and actions of disabled people like Lay and Rushton are proof of the fact that those who now criticise colonialism and slavery are doing so in a tradition that was contemporary with those institutions (rather than engaging in an unfair presentist attempt to hold the persons of the past to the standards of the present).
Guest blogs are welcome. Please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk. We would also like to hear from you if you have found one of the Allies’ blogs helpful to your work.
Image used By Royden1 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63165752
[1] See Caroline Dodds Pinnock, 2022, On Savage Shores: How Indigenous Americans Discovered Europe, p214-215
[2] See David Veevers, 2024, The Great Defiance: How the world took on the British Empire, p87-88