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Edward Long (1734–1813), wrote the History of Jamaica (1774), in part, with the hope that his words would reshape the colony's frontier by drawing yeoman farmers from Britain to the island's unsettled interior. Long's vision was to remake the unimproved frontier into something approximating rural England, which would serve the planter class by reducing island food prices; denuding forested safe havens for runaways and rebels; and refashioning the colony into something that could better withstand nascent British antislavery critique. Long's rhetorical strategy obscured the harsh realities of Jamaica's slave economy while it pointed potential migrants away from commercial slave ownership. This article highlights how the planter-author juxtaposed his picturesque descriptions of the island with quantitative tables that were intended to attract migrants of a certain caste. It was Long's hope that these settlers would be liminally and forever fixed between the enslaved population and the ruling planter class. Long's plans for the creation of British settlements excited neither the ruling class nor potential migrants and therefore failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the struggle of an enslaved mother, Catherine Whitfield, and adult daughter, Ann King, to seek legal redress for their abuse while working as domestic servants to a leading Jamaican magistrate. While well-publicized in its time, this case was often narrated through framings which emphasized spectacular violence and suffering and minimized attentions to Whitfield’s and King’s own strategies of resistance and survival. Centring the women’s agency allows a nuanced analysis of modalities of resistance specific to their situation as a mother-daughter pair, as enslaved domestic servants, and as women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than fifty years, Jamaican farm workers have been seasonally employed in Canada under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). In Canada, these workers live and work in conditions that make them vulnerable to various health issues, including poor mental health. This ethnographic study investigated Jamaican SAWP workers' mental health experiences in Southern Ontario. Several common factors that engender psychological distress among Jamaican workers, ranging from mild to extreme suffering, were uncovered and organised into five themes: (1) family, (2) work environments and SAWP relations, (3) living conditions and isolation, (4) racism and social exclusion, and (5) illness and injury. I found that Jamaican workers predominantly use the term 'stress' to articulate distress, and they associate experiences of suffering with historic plantation slavery. Analysis of workers' stress discourses revealed their experiences of psychological distress are structured by the conditions of the SAWP and their social marginalisation in Ontario. This article presents and discusses these findings in the context of SAWP power dynamics and concludes with policy recommendations aimed at improving the mental health of all SAWP workers. In foregrounding the experiences of Jamaican workers, this study addresses the dearth of research on the health and wellbeing of Caribbean SAWP workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hans Sloane's A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707–25) exemplifies the collecting that would make him famous, includes evidence of the medical practice responsible for some of his wealth and fame, and has served as a key text for scholars puzzling out the relationship between museums, healthcare, empire building, and racial slavery in the Caribbean. This essay examines the strange style that this text and other natural histories adopt, with their long, clunky, repetitive, plain, and sometimes downright boring descriptions of weather, plants, animals, and minerals—and, more alarmingly, human beings, their lives, their bodies, and their suffering. Sianne Ngai's concept of "stuplimity" can help us describe the effects of this tedium, which both awes and shocks with its length, repetitions, and taxonomies and leaves an open feeling akin to the sublime. I further argue that this feeling has embodied consequences that are clear from Sloane's medical case studies. I term this particularly medical aesthetic a "quotidian fever." The term itself refers to regularly occurring but untreatable fevers and embeds within it both the tedium and the possibilities of "the quotidian." The incurability of these fevers—both for patients and on the page—is not overcome, but rather remains incurable because of the imperial world-building enacted by Sloane and represented by his style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses two books, "Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery" by Kate Phillips and "The Glasgow Sugar Aristocracy: Scotland and Caribbean Slavery, 1775–1838" by Stephen Mullen, which explore Scotland's involvement in slavery and the slave trade. The author criticizes Phillips' book for its lack of original manuscript sources and superficial approach, pointing out errors and unsupported claims. Mullen's book is praised for its scholarly apparatus but criticized for not citing previous works, particularly a 1971 doctoral thesis by Tom Devine. The article emphasizes the importance of careful and rigorous research in contributing to the understanding of slavery and its legacies. [Extracted from the article]

"Unsilencing Slavery: Telling Truths About Rose Hall Plantation, Jamaica" by Celia E. Naylor is a critical examination of the public narrative surrounding Rose Hall Plantation in Jamaica. The book focuses on the lives of enslaved people at Rose Hall who have been largely silenced in the presentation tour at the heritage site. Naylor uses archival records and storytelling techniques to shed light on the experiences of enslaved women and children at Rose Hall, challenging the power dynamics that operate through the silencing of alternative narratives. The book offers insights that are relevant to other historic plantation museums and will appeal to Caribbean historians, anthropologists, gender studies specialists, and literary critics. [Extracted from the article]