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From the spring of 1830, the Kingston-based newspaper,Watchman and Jamaica Free Press, published a series of articles discussing the prevalence of interracial concubinage throughout the island of Jamaica. While many discussed concubines as the victims of white men’s lust, equally discussed was the role that mothers had in the continuation of this practice and the degradation of their children. Amid the movement for the abolition of slavery, respectable members of the free community of colour discussed concubines who engaged in interracial sex as unfit mothers and a hindrance to the social progress of the larger community of colour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article revisits one of the most significant questions in the historiography of British West Indian slavery and abolition. It examines the argument that the relatively weak state of the British West Indian economy from the 1780s onward was the main reason why Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. In confronting this question of decline, the article analyzes the largest and most important slave plantation economy – Jamaica – during the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using newly generated indicators such as total factor productivity and national income, the paper constructs a case for the dynamism and efficiency of the plantation system in Jamaica right up to abolition in 1807. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article repositions Orlando Patterson, the originator of "social death," in his Caribbean milieu and suggests that part of why "social death" as a conceptual category has become fossilized is precisely because North American scholars have neglected other works in Patterson's oeuvre, particularly the Caribbean scholarship that precedes Slavery and Social Death and the "richer stories" he attempts to tell in his largely unstudied Caribbean novels of the 1960s. This article attends to the emphasis on the hierarchies of difference and the idiom of sex within an understanding of “social death” in its close reading of Patterson’s 1972 neoslave narrative Die the Long Day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the use of witchcraft as spiritual protection among African slaves in Saint Domingue and Jamaica during mid 18th-century events known as Makandal's conspiracy in Saint Domingue, and Tacky's Rebellion in Jamaica. It examines the concept and development of obeah as a form of resistance, the tactic of using poisoning as a form of rebellion undertaken by slaves, and state attention in the British Caribbean and French Caribben to obeah. The article also discusses the Jamaican decision to criminalize obeah, concern over the relation between poisoning and witchcraft in Europe, and the spiritual traditions of West Africans who became slaves in the Caribbean region.