This talk will explore the presence of the Campbell family, their associates and the Caribbean people whose lives were forever changed in the Grenadine islands during the final decades of the eighteenth century. While doing research on the Campbells in St Vincent during this period, I came across records of transactions between Alexander Campbell of Grenada (the enslaver of Ottobah Cugoano and hundreds more African and African-descended peoples), his nephews, cousins and relatives with Ninian and Penelope Home of Paxton House.
The sale and forced movement of African-descended people was the key to these exchanges. Yet by the 1790s, many of these same enslaved and self-liberated people either witnessed revolution, or were involved in shaping their own destinies and that of their descendants on these islands.
About Dr Désha Amelia Osborne
Désha Amelia Osborne is a Chancellor’s Fellow Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. The daughter of Vincentian immigrants, she is a scholar of Caribbean and transatlantic literary history, and her teaching and research are focused on colonialism, slavery, and the migrations of people, culture, and ideas.
Désha is currently completing a monograph study of Scottish settlers and enslavers in the island of St Vincent during the 18th and early 19th century who were collectively responsible for reconstructing the landscape, culture and historical imagination of the island during this period. The research also works to uncover the lives of Black and mixed-heritage women and their children enslaved by these Scots.
Désha has held research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Special Collections Library in the University of Aberdeen, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Désha previously taught literature in the Department of English and Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York. She completed her PhD in English at the University of Cambridge.
