History Under the Surface: A Punch Bowl at the International Slavery Museum

Katie Cynkar, WPAMC ’25

From the 1767 oil painting, The Swing, by Jean-Honore Fragonard at The Wallace Collection, to a 1991 Super Nintendo at The Museum of the Home, I had the pleasure of seeing an extraordinary amount of visual and material culture on our trip to England for our British Design History course. One object stuck out to me from Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum: a punch bowl made by the Wedgwood factory in Staffordshire in 1787 commemorating the Lord Stanley, a ship. On the surface, this seems like an ordinary object associated with public drinking life in the eighteenth century. However, a closer look reveals its hidden layers.

The first layer that catches my eye is the central hand-painted image of a sailing British ship above text that says, “Success to the Lord Stanley. Capt. Smale.” Maritime themes on ceramics commemorating ships and sailors were popular in the mid-eighteenth century. This one stands out because it commemorates a known slave ship. On March 31, 1786, Capt. John Smale embarked on a slaving voyage on the Lord Stanley. ¹On this ship’s maiden voyage, Smale’s crew departed from Liverpool to Cameroon where 223 captives embarked. From Cameroon, the Lord Stanley sailed to Barbados where 203 captives disembarked. The Lord Stanley would go on to make ten more slaving voyages, with a total of 3,649 captives arriving to various ports in the West Indies.² Over the course of his eight slaving voyages, Capt. John Smale delivered 2,302 captives to various ports in North America, of which the Lord Stanley voyage was his eighth and final slaving voyage.³

The fact that this is a punch bowl is also quite illuminating. Alcoholic punch was extremely popular between the seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries.⁴ During the eighteenth century, rum was a very popular spirit base for punches among Britons, especially sailors, due to its colonial and nautical connotations. This taste for rum punch is particularly potent in a 1772 letter to Town and Country Magazine, in which a character named Mr. Prywell “considers it a high treason to drink brandy punch, being a complete Antigallician [i.e., French-hater], and having the rum trade, and the good of the West-India islands strongly at heart.”⁵ The production of rum and sugar in the Caribbean fueled the slave trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Any rum punch distributed in this punch bowl would certainly have had this direct tie to the slave trade.

Finally, a look at the manufacturer adds another interesting layer to this object. This punch bowl was made at the Wedgwood factory, Etruria, in Staffordshire. The owner, Josiah Wedgwood, was a late-eighteenth century potterer best known for certain innovations in ceramics like creamware, which this punch bowl is an example of. He was also an abolitionist and member of the Society of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade starting in 1787.⁶ From a 1787 resolution, Wedgwood designed what would become the infamous anti-slavery medallion depicting a man in chains kneeling beneath the question, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?.” This medallion was made only one year after the punch bowl. To be sure, Josiah Wedgwood was most likely not the person whose hands made this punch bowl. However, his pottery, and consequently his name, are still associated with this object.

The details of this punch bowl reflect just how insidiously ubiquitous slavery was in the eighteenth century. Slavery was present in the popular decorations on objects and in the foods and drinks people consumed. It was present even when the public personal belief of a businessperson was against it.  As I look at other ordinary eighteenth century objects, I know their contexts run deeper under the surface. And perhaps if we all as museum professionals, collectors, and historians did the same, we could see the complexity of objects and the stories behind them.

1. Jane Webster, “’Success to the Dobson’: Commemorative artefacts depicting 18^th-century British slave ships,” Post-Medieval Archaeology 49 (2015): 79; “Lord Stanley,” Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, accessed 2/10/2024, https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database#results.
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2. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, “Lord Stanley.” ↩︎
3. Webster, “’Success to the Dobson,’” 79; Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, “Lord Stanley.” ↩︎
4. David Wondrich, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (New York: Penguin Group, 2010), 1-58. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 129. ↩︎
6. Caitlin Meehye Beach, Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022): 24. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520390102. ↩︎