Discourse and Counter-Discourses: Missionaries, Literacy, and Black Liberation in the British Caribbean
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the late seventeenth century onward, the central aim of missionary Christianity in the British Atlantic was to Christianize slavery; that is, to render the institution morally and theologically acceptable within a Christian framework. This work of “amelioration” was envisioned as a gradual process, with missionaries from both the established Church of England and a host of dissenting denominations playing a central role in its advancement. Collectively, they promoted a discourse of Christian slavery that aimed both to reassure slaveowners of the compatibility between slavery and Christianity and to frame the conversion of enslaved people as a means of producing a more obedient, industrious, and morally disciplined labor force. To be sure, in promoting a Christianized vision of slavery, missionary societies were deeply complicit in the exploitation of enslaved Africans. Yet, ironically, the very tools they employed to pacify and discipline (biblical instruction and literacy) were repurposed to articulate a platform of resistance, ultimately contributing to slavery’s undoing. This essay employs critical discourse analysis to examine how these dynamics unfolded in two pivotal uprisings in the British Atlantic world: the Demerara Rebellion of 1823 and the Christmas Rebellion of 1831 in Jamaica. In both cases, missionary endeavors contributed to the counter-discursive appropriation of biblical theology that played a critical role in transforming enslaved people into agents of political change. Still, reimagining scripture was only part of the story. Crucially, it was the alignment of a new religious consciousness with unfolding political events, that transformed simmering discontent into open revolt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".