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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]

The late Rev. Margaret Fowler, United Church Minister, was a key supporter of LGBTQ rights and a vocal advocate against human trafficking in Jamaica. As the founder of the Theodora Project, Rev. Fowler served many persons coerced into sex work or subject to sexual exploitation. She argued that human trafficking is a complex connection of economy, gender, social dynamics, law, and foreign relations. She called for the Church to be involved in anti-trafficking work as to do nothing risks "the very real possibility of Jamaica becoming another major area of sex tourism". As we celebrate her life and ministry, we are given the opportunity to carefully excavate her perspective on the nexus among trafficking, slavery, and sex work. It does appear that her discourse follows the traditional Church line, which conflates slavery, trafficking and sex work in a fashion that views sex work as wholly coerced. In exploring the arguments that validated her important ministry in Negril, this chapter centres sex positive approaches to sex work and questions the slavery and exploitation framing that is normal in Christian discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kingston's urban fabric and the architecture of key music sites should therefore showcase as heritage the legacy of reggae, much like New Orleans preserves key components of its city and architecture to showcase the birth-place of jazz. Enslavement Meanwhile, in 2015, Kingston was declared a UNESCO Creative City of Music, and in 2018, UNESCO inscribed the Reggae music of Jamaica as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. After Jamaica gained its Independence on August 6, 1962, wailing cries of reggae emerged from the people experiencing homelessness, landlessness, poverty, and deprivation in West Kingston. [Extracted from the article]

This paper deals with the current demands of compensation for the damages and crimes caused by the transatlantic slave trade of African persons and from the institution of slavery in the Americas. This proposal has been put forward by many actors and in different global historical contexts and it is currently is fundamental issue in the agenda of Afro-American activism, especially in the English-speaking Caribbean and in the United States. This topic is also under discussion in Latin America as a part of the "afro-reparations" approach. The article analyzes the mobilization around this issue in the English-speaking Caribbean, the "reparative justice" agenda put forward by the CARICOM Reparations Commission --mainly composed by former British colonies in the Caribbean--, and the demands directed against European governments. Using data collected in Jamaica, this text exposes the main arguments presented by advocates of reparations, as well the arenas where they have been more active: public education, awareness raising campaign and archival reconstruction of documentation evidencing the economic impact of slavery. Next, the activity of advocates in the social media and in transnational debates is discussed. Finally, consideration is given to the different approaches to the topic of reparations seen from an interregional perspective, focusing in viewpoints drawn from Cuba as a case representing the Spanish-speaking Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper provides the first quantitative assessment of colonial Jamaican real incomes and income inequality. We collect local prices to construct cost of living and purchasing power parity indicators. The latter lowers Jamaica's GDP per capita compared with the rest of the Atlantic economy. We also compute welfare ratios for a range of occupations and build a social table. We find that, being a net food importer, the slave colony had extremely high living costs, which rose steeply during the American War of Independence, and low standards of living, particularly for its enslaved population, but also for the free unskilled population that competed with slave labor. Our results also show that due to its extreme poverty for the many in the middle of great wealth for the few, Jamaica was the most unequal place yet studied in the pre-modern world. Furthermore, all of these characteristics applied to the free population alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antagonistic racial, economic and cultural climate Afro-Jamaicans faced during and following enslavement led to numerous revolts, plots and conspiracies. Whereas numerous studies on Jamaica's revolts, from the 1820's onward, credits the fight for social change to missionary based religions, of the Baptists, Moravians and Methodists, I highlight contrary to this view that Obeah, the target of missionary disdain, was the driving force in Afro-Jamaica's fight for justice and freedom. Supporting this view are the various plots and revolts that occurred between the 1820's and 1860's. Within these events Obeah specialists and rituals were indispensable. To illustrate Obeah's primacy the article features Guinea Jack, a renowned Obeah man in the 1820's with a prominent role as spiritual doctor and diviner for the 1824 Boxing Day Conspiracy. And for the emancipation period the paper examines Paul Bogle and his Morant Bay War. Bogle in most studies is typified as a Baptist minister however he performed Obeah rituals Guinea Jack had used in the 1820's. Doing so enshrines Obeah as a coherent religious cultural system inherited between generations rather than a hodgepodge free for all superstitious practice as white missionaries had implied. Exposing this aspect in Paul Bogle's spirituality challenges previous assumptions where he is strictly viewed through Christian lens. Interrogating Bogle's association with African spirituality showed that as late as 1865 Obeah for many Afro-Jamaicans remained valuable in the fight for freedom. And to explain Obeah's contribution in struggles to combat the evils of slavery and colonization, between the 1820's and 1860's, the article discusses oath rituals, herbal baths, animal sacrifices and divinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jamaica's criminalization of Obeah after Tacky's 1760 Revolt resulted in many accusations and prosecutions of alleged clients and practitioners by planters who intended to prevent similar future slave rebellions and eliminate rivals who competed for enslaved people's loyalty. Such efforts produced many slave laws and policing efforts, which legitimized and expanded slaveholders' dominance and power, but ironically, increased enslaved people's bargaining powers. Exploring how legal definitions of poison and Obeah changed over time and the political and social purposes poison and Obeah accusations served, reveals the complex ways in which the enslaver and enslaved struggled for dominance and survival within Jamaica's slave society. While poison and Obeah laws, accusations and prosecutions give us good insights into the complicated conflicts, tensions and negotiations between enslaver and enslaved and among members of slave communities, they yield an unfortunate legacy that defame Obeah as witchcraft and fraud and erroneously attribute poison as a key element. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the cultural and political practice of Jamaican Maroons, and assesses their roles in the eighteenth-century colonial orders. It examines the contributions of Jamaican Maroons in British colonial power, in the plantation industry, and in the syncretism of Jamaican culture. It narrates the characteristics of Jamaican planters in the eighteenth-century Jamaica, the brutal nature of slave punishments during this time as well as the secular practices of everyday life. It recounts the oppositions of Maroon communities against Jamaica's slave society and early British settlers, and later, their peaceful relationship with the British. It also mentions Maroons' expertise in the belief known as Obeah, their passion for dances, and influence in the Atlantic sound.

This article explores relations between free people of colour and white men in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. Using evidence from wills and other contemporary sources, it considers the types of bequests that white slaveholders made to free people of colour and to white people. In a slave society divided by racialized boundaries of rule, slaveholders' liaisons with non-white concubines and the existence of mixed-race children had the potential to undermine the local social order. However, slaveholders sought to limit the wealth of nonwhites and did not recognize mixed-race children as their legitimate heirs. Therefore, free people of colour gained only limited benefits from their relations with white men. While free non-whites frequently received bequests of land, personal property and slaves from white testators, the main beneficiaries of slaveholders' wills were almost always white men. These practices kept wealth mainly in the hands of whites and perpetuated racialized boundaries of rule in Jamaica. However, they also led to the emergence of a relatively privileged coloured section of local society that became an important element in social and political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the extent to which Afro-Jamaicans could live up to the metropolitan, middle-class ideal of marriage during the Apprenticeship System, that is the period 1834-1838 during which slaves in the British Caribbean were prepared for free-wage labour. It shows that the Abolition of Slavery Act issued by the Imperial Government in 1833, the various local Acts that had to give effect to this Act, and legal and extra-legal practices adopted by the planters, made it far more difficult for Afro-Jamaicans to mirror their relationship to the metropolitan ideal during the Apprenticeship System than during slavery. It explains this phenomenon by examining the planters' concerns about the change in their social and economic status and several factors that impinged upon the Imperial Government's ability to bring the metropolitan ideal within close range of the apprentices. This explanation confirms the thesis that the Apprenticeship System was worse than slavery and provides also an insight into the ways in which planters tried to retain the social hierarchy that had been established during slavery [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Francis Williams was a free Black in Jamaica who wrote poetry in Latin during the 18th century. Almost everything publicly known about Williams is found in Edward Long's 'History of Jamaica,' published in 1774. At least 30 years before Long's 1774 account of Williams, the extraordinary free Jamaican Black was the subject of argument about the alleged inferiority of people of African descent. By the 1720s Williams had inherited and amassed so much land and power in Jamaica that he was a particular target of "An Act for the better regulating Slaves, and rendering free Negroes and Mulattoes more useful," passed by the Jamaica Assembly on March 28, 1730. The new law was intended to repeal previous laws favoring free Blacks, and especially Williams. Williams is acknowledged as a contested transatlantic icon of Black achievement in the 18th century.

Four burials were excavated from discrete house-yard compounds in an eighteenth century African Jamaican slave settlement at Seville plantation. Though only four in number, these individuals provide significant information on burial practices and physical conditions within a clearly defined African Jamaican community. The analysis of material remains illuminate living conditions and social relations within the African Jamaican community. Each individual was interred within a separate house-yard and with a unique set of artifacts that yield information about their unique identities and positions within the Seville community. Bioarchaeological assessments describe the osteological remains and detail findings concerning pathologies. To date, they are the only excavated individuals who represent the African Caribbean practice of house-yard burial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the quotidian practices of the slave courts in Saint Andrew, Jamaica during the 18th century. Background on the city of Saint Andrew and its slave society; Crimes that involved slaves; Reasons of slaveholders for bringing their slaves to court; Punishments and their meaning.