Search

Die the Long Day narrates the 24 hours following the flight, capture, and brutal murder of Quasheba, a fugitive slave, on an 18th-century Jamaican plantation. Quasheba is remembered, retroactively, for her defiance of, despite ultimate defeat by, both the extreme gendered violence of the plantation and the paternalism of the narrative. The climax of this novel is Quasheba's funeral, on which her community insists in accordance with their communal, African religious (Myal) rites. In these following pages I will consider how Quasheba's spirit galvanizes this community as much as it may threaten to destroy it, and how this narrative places Obeah/Myal at the center of spiritual survival in the face of ever-present physical—and social—death during and after slavery, and at the center of strategies for the survival of its aftereffects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slave societies such as Jamaica were among the earliest regions to adopt new technologies, suggesting that slavery was not synonymous with economic backwardness. This article uses the efforts of the Falmouth Water Company to adopt the new hydraulic ram between 1799 and 1805 to show that this process was also not restricted to the plantation sector and that the island possessed an unexpected capacity for technological adaption. This was based on local skills in mechanical and civil engineering derived from the plantation sector, and a wider political and financial background that supported innovation when the right conditions were in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Jamaica is one of the few Commonwealth countries that still recognises the Privy Council in London as its court of final appeal. This article argues that the monarchy in Jamaica should be replaced by a republican form of government and that the Privy Council should be replaced as the final appellate tribunal by the Caribbean Court of Justice. In the view of the author, this is an issue that goes to the heart of the identity and self-image of the Jamaican people, and it is rooted in the cry for freedom of Jamaicans’ enslaved ancestors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.