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This dissertation examines how news and information circulated among select colonies in the British and French Caribbean during a series of military conflicts from 1763 to 1804, including the American War of Independence (1775-1783), French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). The colonies included in this study are Barbados, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Saint-Domingue. This dissertation argues that the sociopolitical upheaval experienced by colonial residents during these military conflicts led to an increased desire for news that was satiated by the development and improvement of many processes of collecting and distributing information. This dissertation looks at some of these processes, the ways in which select social groups both influenced and were affected by them, and why such phenomena occurred in the greater context of the 18th and early 19th century Caribbean at large. In terms of the types of processes, it examines various kinds of print culture, such as colonial newspapers, books, and almanacs, as well as correspondence records among different social groups. In terms of which groups are studied, these include printers, postal service workers, colonial and naval officials, and Catholic missionaries. The dissertation is divided into five chapters, the first of which provides insight into the operation of the mail service established in the aforementioned colonies, and the ways in which the Atlantic Revolutions impacted their service in terms of the different historical actors responsible for collecting and distributing correspondences. Chapter two looks at select British and French colonial printers, their print shops, and the book trade in the Caribbean isles during the 18th century. Chapter three delves into the colonial newspapers and compares the differences and similarities among government-sanctioned newspapers vis-à-vis independently produced papers. It uses the case of the Haitian Revolution to track how news of the slave insurrection was disseminated or constricted in the weeks immediately following the night of 22 August 1791. Chapter four examines the colonial almanac as a means of connecting colonial residents with people across the wider Atlantic World. It also surveys the development of these pocketbooks from mere astrological calendars to essential items that owners customized and frequently carried on their person, given the swathes of information they featured after the American War of Independence. The final chapter looks at the daily operations of Capuchin and Dominican missionaries in Martinique and Guadeloupe at the end of the 18th century and how they maintained their communications within the islands and with the heads of their Catholic orders in France, as well as in Rome. Overall, this project aims to fill in some of the gaps in the literature regarding how select British and French colonial residents received and dispatched information, and the effect this had in their respective Caribbean islands. It also sheds light on some of the ways that slaves were incorporated into the mechanisms by which information was collected and distributed, such as their encounters with printers, employment as couriers, and use as messengers to relay documents between colonial officials. In doing so, it hopes to encourage future discussion regarding how information moved in the British and French Caribbean amid periods of revolution and military conflict, how and why these processes changed, and the impact this had on print culture and mail systems in the post-revolutionary period of the 19th century.

Oceanic Entanglements: Race, Gender, and Fantasies of Freedom in Narratives of Indian Indentured Labor examines literary representations of Indian indentured labor alongside the colonial archive. My dissertation proposes that indentured labor in the British Empire—a colonial labor apparatus designed to replace slave labor in the Caribbean, Fiji, Mauritius, among other sugar colonies—is a critical site to examine the fault lines of post-abolition colonial narratives of liberalism. Making use of a theoretical framework that I call “oceanic entanglements,” which seeks out the often-obscured relationships and interdependencies between colonial systems or ideologies, my project unearths how the British Empire manufactured indenture as a voluntary labor force in order to proliferate post-abolitionist narratives of freedom, even as such narratives were predicated on indentured laborers’ unfree conditions. In order to frame indenture as voluntary and therefore fulfilling a fantasy of freedom, I further contend, colonial ideology needed to invent the indentured laborer as a modern liberal subject who has access to choices, and has the ability to consent to indenture. Oceanic Entanglements suggests that the figure of the indentured woman becomes an important site upon which colonial discourse fabricated consent on the level of plantation labor and sexual labor. To explore the workings of the British Empire in generating fantasies of freedom, I read contemporary fiction that reimagines indenture, Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and David Dabydeen’s The Counting House, alongside colonial reports that document Caribbean indentured labor conditions and chronicle debates around the West Indian labor question in the post-abolition moment. The project reads these materials through the “entanglement” between slavery and indenture as two interdependent colonial labor regimes. In addition to examining the colonial production of narratives of freedom, I suggest that this entanglement can help generate interracial solidarities in the postcolonial Caribbean. If the beginnings of indenture prove to be a crucial moment of examination, so does the end of indenture. My project uses Ryhaan Shah’s novel Weaving Waters alongside Indian nationalist political rhetoric around indentured labor in early twentieth-century India to argue that anti-indenture campaigns and the consolidation of Indian nationalist identity are entangled. Through my exploration of entanglements, this dissertation enriches the fields of postcolonial, South Asian, and critical race studies.

This study, in short, examines the impact of Thome and Kimball's Emancipation in the West Indies text on the changing understanding of immediatism and on the concomitant shifts in American antislavery discourse and tactics leading up to 1840. I take up the questionof how new forms of discipline and labor exploitation which were pioneered in the British Caribbean came to influence abolitionists' vision of freedom and discuss possible consequences only briefly in the conclusion as I point to further directions in which a studysuch as this could be taken.