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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]

This article presents a case study of an innovative culturally based therapeutic approach using collective poiesis to improve the functioning of a youth sports team in Jamaica. In recent decades, Jamaica has endured high levels of violence and corruption, and has been ranked among the top four countries in the world in terms of murder rate per capita. We conjecture that a high prevalence of personality disorder linked to the legacy of slavery and colonialism often impedes Jamaicans from achieving success in diverse fields, including sports. Psychological interventions in the preparation of football teams are a novelty, and have been used mainly to enhance global team performance or individual player skill. The use of psychological interventions to address personality disorder psychopathology on the soccer pitch has not been reported. Psychohistoriographic cultural therapy (PCT) integrates psychological perspectives with a dialectic method of historical analysis and uses collective poiesis as a vehicle to translate insights through an embodied cognitive restructuring process. Two workshops were carried out with a high school football team using PCT techniques. The process of dialectic reasoning engaged their collective ideas and insights to establish a psychic centrality that was expressed in poetic form to illustrate the pathologies of the group in an emotionally safe and psychologically acceptable narrative. This poetic narrative of the group's psychic centrality counters the personality disorder psychopathology caused by the lingering intergenerational wounds of slavery, colonial oppression and collective trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning Black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx's support for emancipation was conditional on the level of 'civilisation' attained by Black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx's racist defence of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx's nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-Black racism of Marx and the place Black workers occupy in his historical-materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and Black liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the novel "The Woman of Colour" and its portrayal of a woman of color, Olivia Fairfield who rejects traditional marriage and returns to Jamaica, Caribbean after inheriting a fortune, challenging conventional narratives and addressing issues of race, slavery, and heterosexuality. Topics include the novel's unconventional ending, Olivia's liberation, and liberation while critiquing the entanglement of heterosexual desire, racism, and place.

This article explores the central role of Africanisms in Africans' revolts against enslavement in Haiti and Jamaica. There is an investigation on the memories of Africa that motivated the military leaders and the African masses in their insurrections or wars against their European enslavers in these countries. Hence, there is an investigation of Africanisms such as knowledge of governance and political organization, military training, code of military conduct, African cosmologies, knowledge on the decentralization of power, among other African derived values and beliefs that were learnt in Africa. These Africanisms informed the military and other modes of resistance against European colonizers. There is also attention to traditional African spirituality. Evidence is presented on the influences of spiritual beliefs and practices on military incursions during the enslavement era and in post-emancipation culture. There is a discussion on Vodun, Legba, Kafou, Eshu, Obeah, and Anansi. There is an analysis of the factors that accounted for military success or failure in the enslaved Africans' military wars or revolts against European enslavers in the countries being discussed. The current modes of resistance in post-emancipation are also addressed. [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]

Excavations at the Orange Valley hospital for the enslaved in Trelawny Parish, Jamaica, have revealed rich deposits of early nineteenth-century artifacts. These artifacts, when analyzed in conjunction with the building itself, surviving documents, and the broader landscape in which it stands, speak to the lives of enslaved people of African descent during the period of amelioration. Archaeology is beginning to reveal how plantation hospitals were employed to perpetuate the institution of slavery; while also illuminating how the enslaved patients and workers in the hospital were able to create meaningful lives and identities, that reflected their own traditions, despite the brutal drudgery of sugar production. [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 essay concentrates on the relation between song and history in the lives of the enslaved and the afterlives of slavery, particularly by tracing the history of the song "Take Him to the Gulley," which became known as "the famous slave song of Jamaica." Thinking alongside Katherine McKittrick's and Sylvia Wynter's work on plantation geographies, the author argues that the gulley, a site of mass burial in the center of the song, was also a site of Black cultural expression and futurity—a place where death and life, torture and escape, enslavement and freedom collided and shaped each other. The essay traces the song as both a mode and a performance of history, in which, through the workings of reclamation, remembrance, and redress, an enslaver's perverse punishment became a people's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After playing a leading role in opposing Jamaica's largely white plantocracy and the island's English governor, both as a journalist and a politician, mixed-race Jamaican Robert A. Johnson (1825–1899) migrated to New York in July 1865, where he joined the editorial staff of the New York Tribune. A few months later, news reached New York of an outbreak in Morant Bay and the violent government suppression that followed. Johnson covered these events from New York, with deep personal knowledge of Jamaica and an ability to read against the grain of the newspaper accounts arriving by steamship. This article recovers Johnson's body of writing on Jamaica published in the Nation, the Evening Post, the New York Tribune, and Hours at Home in 1865–1866 and locates it within a public debate then taking place about what lessons should be drawn from Jamaica for race relations in America. Pointing to the legal mechanisms of planter power, Johnson warned his readers, 'the whole of this bloody affair ... shows also how unsafe it is to intrust the keeping of negro rights to the hands of men bred in the school of slavery or inheriting its traditions.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The development of iron technologies in mid–eighteenth Century Britain led to an explosion in the variety and scope of iron objects manufactured for the consumer market. One of the primary markets for iron goods was the Caribbean plantation complex. An astonishing amount of iron ware was shipped to Jamaica, where archaeological investigations at Marshalls Pen, a nineteenth-century coffee plantation, recovered a variety of iron tools and other metal objects from enslaved household contexts. A selection of these tools show evidence that the enslaved population of the plantation reshaped these tools for their own purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article examines two female slaveholders, one real and one fictional, to explore the relationship between gender and slave management in both history and popular culture. Annie Palmer, the "White Witch of Rose Hall" plantation in Jamaica, although the creation of folklore and journalistic exaggeration, has functioned for a century and a half as a symbol not only of the evils of slavery but of the idea that female slaveholders' cruelty threatened the system of slavery in a way in which that practiced by males did not. In New Orleans, Delphine Lalaurie, an elite woman renowned for her elegance and piety, became a figure of monstrosity after a house fire of 1834 revealed that her French Quarter mansion held a chamber of horrors for the enslaved, and offered a similar example of the dangers of female power in slave societies. Examining these women's continuing presence both as historical figures and as characters in novels, television shows, and other creative productions, this article illuminates the strange career of the slaveholding woman, a figure execrated in her own era and misunderstood or ignored in contemporary historiography, yet simultaneously the subject over centuries of prurient cultural fascination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the "seasoning" of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica's Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally "tame" Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I situate Orlando Patterson's magnum opus, Slavery and Social Death alongside his earlier writings on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica. To appreciate fully Patterson's contributions to sociology, comparative historical sociology, and the wider literature on slavery, readers must engage with the full corpus of his scholarly production. By reading his body of work all together, as part of a much larger whole, social death may take on new angles, depths, and dimensions. Patterson's previous work on slavery and slave revolts in Jamaica, I suggest, invites novel ways to read his formulations of social death while opening other archives through which to study the (after)lives of slavery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creative industries are understood as key to Jamaica's resilience. Development initiatives encourage Jamaicans to recall historical resilience in the face of slavery and colonization in order to construct contemporary neoliberal-led development goals focused on creative practice. This paper asks what tensions, contradictions and erasures are made visible when grounding resilience in context specific sites? What are the implications of framing historical forms of resilience grounded in slavery and colonialism as commensurable with those traits that define the resilient subject of neoliberal development? And, what meanings of resilience are evident when local communities are confronted with a state apparatus that contributes to insecurity and attempts to discipline the celebratory and creative livelihoods made available through creative practice? [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]

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]

During the First Maroon War, violent battles between Maroons and British colonists were frequent and violent. How then, after the peace treaties, did former enemies negotiate their new positions as allies? How did colonists accept this new status quo while balancing it with racial beliefs of the era? This article examines Maroon and colonist efforts to progress in a physically difficult and socially charged environment while living side-by-side with a large enslaved population. Ultimately, some influential planters, as opposed to poorer settlers, came to recognise the mutual benefits this uneasy peace provided. That is not to say these colonists were not fearful of the Maroons but that they recognised the usefulness of the Maroon communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Following the end of slavery and apprenticeship in British Jamaica, the Jamaican House of Assembly instituted an immigration program to bring indentured workers to the island in order to counteract the ability of the emancipated black slaves to demand high wages. In 1840 Ireland became a target for the recruitment of such indentures, but almost immediately Irish humanitarians protested the ‘Jamaica Emigration Scheme’, calling it slavery under another name. Efforts to attract Irish laborers in Limerick to board the Robert Kerr, an emigrant ship bound for Jamaica, sparked their activity, and their agitation continued in the aftermath of its departure in January 1841. Irish abolitionists affiliated with the Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society and Irish nationalists affiliated with Daniel O’Connell’s Loyal National Repeal Association organized against the attempt to indenture Irish workers in Jamaica. This article explores the reasons why and the ways in which members of both organizations cooperated in their protests against the Jamaica Emigration Scheme. In particular, it examines what their interactions reveal about the motives of each organization, the relationship between antislavery activism and anti-emigration attitudes, and the ways in which the recruitment of Irish indentures complicated debates among reformers about the nature of free and unfree labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Marlon James’s neo-slave narrative,The Book of Night Women(2009), an Irish overseer embodies both the most hegemonic expression of colonial Enlightenment and the utopian promise of an alternative kind of Enlightenment futurity. This article explores both of these linkages. It brings to bear Luke Gibbons’s concept of the ‘sympathetic sublime’ in order to do so and demonstrates the strengths and limitations of a politics based in the Irishman’s sympathetic identification with the suffering black body. It emphasizes the radical potential of such sympathy while indicating that affective politics requires the supplement of a cognitive grasp of slavery as a system of domination and labor exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Today, some 80 countries around the world have legislation criminalizing homosexuality, while those who engage in same-sex relations risk mob violence resulting from cultural intolerance. Despite this, gay rights advocacy within these countries exists. This paper examines gay rights advocacy in Jamaica – a nation which criminalizes same-sex relations and which has been identified by observers as among the most intolerant of same-sex relations. Using interviews with gay rights activists working with Jamaica’s leading gay rights organization, this paper describes the gay rights movement in a climate of repression. It begins with an overview of Jamaican sexual values, tracing its condemnation of homosexuality to a history of plantation slavery. Next, it discusses the emergence of a gay pride movement and the development of a broad-based association for all sexual orientations and identities. Finally, it examines the advocacy and activism of theJamaican Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays, a voice for Jamaica’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered community. Throughout, the paper reveals how even an oppressed identity may find a voice and thrive despite the greatest of legal and cultural challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 essay presents the previously unpublished ‘Memoirs’ of Florence Hall, an African-born woman enslaved in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. The brief text describes Hall's childhood in Igboland (now southeastern Nigeria), her enslavement and journey to the Atlantic coast, her experience of the Middle Passage, and her arrival in Jamaica. There, the narrative abruptly cuts off. Evidently, the pages containing the rest of her story were lost. The text was likely written in the early nineteenth century, mediated by planter Robert Johnston, in whose papers the surviving text was found. As one of the only slave trade narratives from an African woman anywhere in the Americas, Hall's ‘Memoirs’ offer a rare opportunity to consider the transatlantic slave trade at its peak from the viewpoint of a female captive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Cultural characteristics that make rural destinations appealing to visitors could limit local engagement in rural tourism development as well. So, the paper looked at St. Thomas in Jamaica to determine the elements of their culture on which a strong rural tourism product could be built but could also limit local participation in the development of their rural tourism industry. St. Thomas is a rural island community with a rich history steeped in colonialism. Interviews and radio program transcripts as well as notes from a town hall meeting of residents were analyzed. Fifteen elements were identified in this community’s culture that explain their traditional, conservative, close to nature, and spiritual way of life; five were identified as possible drivers of community members’ nonengagement behaviors. A holistic approach to resolving cultural dichotomies in rural tourism communities that would preserve cultural characteristics treasured locally and improve local engagement behaviors was proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the double erasure of both women and the slaves they owned from the conjoined histories of slavery and empire. It shows how the economic practices of free women of European and African descent helped to make Jamaica the wealthiest and largest slaveholding colony in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic world. The growth of Britain’s American colonies created novel financial and social opportunities for women. They acted as vigorous participants in a high risk marketplace that was being made global by European imperial activities. As merchants, women strengthened the economic ties between Britain and the Caribbean, and helped to make Jamaica an important commercial hub. Financial pragmatism rather than nationalist sentiments drove them to pursue trade in Spanish territories, while also profiting from the frequent military conflicts between European powers. Women’s abilities to pursue entrepreneurial ventures were deeply intertwined with slave ownership. They had a vested interest in maintaining and advancing the severe labour regime in Jamaica and elsewhere in British America. Slave ownership reconfigured women’s financial, legal and social positions. In the colony, the status of being free came to matter more than any other signifier of identity, including gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of neoliberalism in Jamaica. It offers information on the efforts of the Middle Rock Community Council to prohibit slavery. It presents information on the Middle Rock's Emancipation Day festival in the U.S. Information on foreign investors focused on bauxite industry is presented.

The African ethnicity of New World slaves was highly significant for the transmission of African social, cultural and religious beliefs and practices. This study employs the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis of present-day Jamaicans in order to assess the ethnic origins of their enslaved female ancestors (males, including white overseers and masters, do not contribute to mtDNA). The evidence suggests that the Gold Coast was the largest single source of Jamaican slaves who arrived, remained and survived in Jamaica. While this finding fits with some historical evidence, it refines the data contained within the Voyages: Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, which indicates that the Bight of Biafra provided the most enslaved Africans to Jamaica. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Customarily, studies of urbanization in early British America have concentrated on its northern mainland seaports. This article moves beyond a thirteen colonies perspective to define and explore a Greater Caribbean urban world, with Charleston, South Carolina, at its most northerly point. In particular, the authors’ comparison of the internal dynamic of Charleston and Kingston, Jamaica, reveals an urban world that was no more dominated by the demands of the plantation sector than the northern seaports were beholden to their agricultural interiors. Significantly, however, these rich internal urban economies relied on, and were profoundly shaped by, the institution of slavery. In light of these findings, the authors thus characterize this Greater Caribbean urban zone as constituting one strand of urbanization in a larger British Atlantic world that experienced an overall expansion and diversification of the urban form across the early modern period. Most specifically, Charleston and Kingston achieved a growth rate and an economic complexity comparable to other English-speaking towns through their embrace of enslaved people and their labor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of the Seven Years' War, Jamaican planters were in an extremely strong position within the British Empire. Immensely wealthy, geopolitically important and constitutionally assertive, Jamaican planters used their strong position to win a series of political battles against colonial governors in the 1750s and 1760s. In doing so, they justified their self-asserted claims to being entitled to British rights and privileges. Nevertheless, contemporaneous developments in metropolitan thinking about empire and white people's place in empire undermined planters' fond estimation of their position within empire. British thinkers came to see British West Indians, especially during and after the American Revolution, not as fellow citizens but as imperial subjects. The result was a cultural and ideological crisis for Jamaican planters as abolitionism emerged as a powerful political force, in which their insistence that they were British and entitled to the rights and privileges of Britons was not accepted. Thus, white Jamaicans became the first in a long line of settler peoples of British descent to have their claims to Britishness denied by metropolitan opinion. This article thus contributes to a developing discussion about settler constitutional rights within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article contributes to the scholarly literature on labour relations in the transition from slavery to freedom in Jamaica. Based on the plantation papers of the Goulburn family, who owned Amity Hall sugar estate in Vere parish, it traces the contested negotiations between apprentices and free blacks on the one hand and the absentee owner and his manager on the other in a period of two transitions, from slavery to apprenticeship in 1834 and from apprenticeship to a restricted freedom in 1838. This enables one to document the variety of ways in which this crucial period affected the conditions, hours and remuneration for work. Though Amity Hall had a less fractious transition out of slavery than some other Jamaican plantations, the article reveals the difficulties faced by planters in overcoming labour shortages, the bargaining power of Jamaicans at crop time, and the contests over wages, rents and provision grounds that shaped labour relations after 1838. By 1840, the owner and manager and the workers at Amity Hall had not bridged the clear division in their expectations and interests since the Emancipation Bill came into effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the works of Jamaican painter Roberta Stoddart which charts a journey of consciousness and transformation. It discusses the work of Stoddart which involves a process of deep questioning and deals the psychic legacy of slavery. It highlights paintings in the portfolio of Stoddart which handle the question of slavery frontally, such as Tools of the Trade and Black Pearls, which use the symbol of the slave ship.

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.

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the role of minor ports in eighteenth-century Jamaica. It examines the island's western ports of Montego Bay, Lucea, and Savanna-la-mar. In 1766, the British Parliament passed the Free Port Act of Jamaica, which resulted in an increase in sailing traffic from neighbouring Caribbean colonies and other colonies and kingdoms in the Atlantic world. By mid-eighteenth century, western Jamaica experienced a significent amount of growth in its commercial, agricultural, and communication sectors. In addition, enslaved Africans and Scottish emigrants arrived directly from West Africa and Scotland to minor ports in western Jamaica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bleak moral vision in Vincent Brown's "The Reaper's Garden" offers to us a version of early America that is profoundly at odds with established, or at least popular, narratives of American historical development. It is also at odds with customary narratives of Caribbean history. These narratives deal as much about creativity as about destruction. They also see the merging of white and black in the crucible of slavery as producing not just death but also a viable Caribbean culture. Consequently, Brown's work is both a challenge to Caribbean orthodoxy and also a reiteration of long-standing jeremiads about how the settlement and exploitation of the Americas exemplified the darkness that is present in men's souls. Brown's vision of a Jamaica that looked like heaven but which was instead a hell on earth is compelling. I do wonder, however, whether in this hell there may have been some patches of sunlight that allow us to create a usable Jamaican past in which even planters might have some place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early 2006, the parish councilors of St Elizabeth, Jamaica, decided not to support plans for celebration of the abolition of slavery citing the position taken by National Hero Sir Alexander Bustamante, founding father of the Jamaica Labour Party, that 'we should celebrate our achievements (but) we should not look back at our shame'. This article looks at this instance and others like it of ambivalence towards the memory of slavery and how it ought to be treated today. Main sources for the article are discussions in the public sphere, radio, newspaper and television debates on the subject, and interviews with key principals such as the chairwoman of the Committee for the Commemoration of the Abolition of Slavery as well as dissenting voices such as the St Elizabeth councilors during the period 2006-2007 in the run-up to commemorative activities. [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]

Focussing on the early nineteenth century, this article examines the ways in which white slaveholders in Jamaica developed a distinctive local ideology based on the institution of slavery. Whites were in a minority in Jamaican slave society, slaveholding was widespread amongst white settlers, and all white men experienced privileges in a society organised around racialised boundaries of rule. These factors helped to ensure that Jamaican colonists developed a distinctively local, or creole, world view characterised by the defence of slavery and a culture of white male solidarity. However, local slaveholders maintained close links with Britain and were militarily dependent on the metropole. Metropolitan culture influenced their ideology, and Jamaican slaveholders saw themselves as loyal subjects of the British Crown. They were therefore colonial creoles and, in spite of the rise of abolitionism in the metropole, they maintained that their local practices were reconcilable with their status as transplanted Britons. By the 1830s changed circumstances in Britain and Jamaica forced slaveholders to reach a compromise with the British Government and to accept the abolition of slavery, but in spite of the important changes that this entailed, the main features of their creole world view persisted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article assesses the book "Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867," by Catherine Hall from the perspectives of a historian. He says that the book offers a rich insight into the ideas and mores of mid nineteenth-century provincial English midlands society and how those beliefs were translated as practice to Jamaica, a slave economy that then moved through apprenticeship to new forms of racial paternalism. In the book, the reader is introduced to Christian, notably Baptist, views of Jamaica, ideas about and notions of slavery, race, class, color, culture, colonialism, and empire.

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]

This paper, through an examination of industrially related artefacts, physical remains or above ground exposed structures and machinery on sites of selected former slave sugar estates in Jamaica, argues that there are excellent loci for industrial archaeology in the island. The recording, study, interpretation and possible preservation of these sites within their social and historical contexts will invariably indicate not only the rich industrial heritage, but also the technological capabilities of the sugar industry during slavery. By providing technical information on infrastructure and equipment, industrial archaeology will enable the economic historian better to discuss the generally held view that slavery and planter conservatism retarded qualitative change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]