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The rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas fostered environments where bondspeople and commoners in West Africa and the British Caribbean had more in common with each other than the slave-owning elites. An emergent class consciousness and similar concepts of freedom intersected with the evolving landscape of power and oppression, opportunity, and restriction in West Africa and the West Indies to inform how enslaved peoples navigated bondage in the British Caribbean from the late eighteenth century to abolition in 1838. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon Wayne Modest’s work on the representation of Caribbean and enslaved people in the British Museum, this article examines the representation of Caribbean plantations in several British establishments, the Museum of London Docklands, the National Maritime Museum, the Mshed Museum, the Georgian House, and the International Slavery Museum. Drawing on Black feminist works on race, geography and identity, I argue that these museums create a homogenised vision of the Caribbean, which results in a homogenised depiction of enslaved peoples. Specifically, resistance to slavery is presented as a largely masculine endeavour and taking place only in terms of military conflict. Indeed, representations of enslaved women are largely absent in many of these museums. Only the International Slavery Museum achieves a complex rendering of the Caribbean by pushing against the limitations of abolitionist produced representations of the Caribbean and incorporating models and a multifaceted range of testimonies, including that of enslaved women.

Copyright of Práticas da História is the property of Práticas da História and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Beginning in the 1780s, British Caribbean plantocracies faced the looming threat of slave trade abolition which would end the flow of enslaved labour fundamental to colonial plantation economies. Enslaved women’s function as the source of blackness and legal slave status made their wombs essential to a future without readily available slave imports. The general narrative centring the intensifying colonial domination of enslaved women’s wombs highlight abolitionists and slave owner’s deployment of slave women’s reproductive labour in a slave-breeding program that would produce a self-sustaining source of labour. This narrative neglects the agency enslaved women exerted in exacting control over their sexuality, marriage status, pregnancies, childbirth experience, and child-rearing process that jeopardised the institution of slavery in “gynecological revolt.” This essay privileges the feminized, unarmed, sexual, bodily defiance of enslaved women within the greater, often masculinized Caribbean slavery scholarship to argue that the womb was a site of intensifying colonial domination in the Age of Abolition but more significantly a site of women’s revolutionary struggle against slavery.

This essay explores the contingent relationships between landownership and status in Britain, the Caribbean, and the East Coast of North America across the long eighteenth century. In Britain, where land was scarce, land was the measure of wealth and status, and the creation of landed estates bound the ruling elite together. As the global economy expanded, driven by colonialism, new relationships were embedded within very different cultural landscapes. In the Caribbean, plantation landscapes were high-risk investments that relied on enslaved labor to ensure returns on highly capitalized production. In America, the availability of land recast the relationship between improvement, landownership, and labor. Land played an important role in defining newfound freedoms increasingly at odds with coercion and enslavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Probate inventories helped to support the established social and economic order in colonial Jamaica. These documents were part of the legal process of winding up an estate after a death and presented an account of personal possessions that had belonged to a decedent. They facilitated the transfer of property to heirs and identified those parts of an estate that were available for the repayment of debts. The inventories contain lists of enslaved people, representing them as a type of "property," and so these documents form a major part of the archive of Jamaican slavery. This article explores the practices, aims, and assumptions of the people who produced the inventories, developing our understanding of slaveholder culture in the British Caribbean and of the bureaucratic and accounting techniques that facilitated slave management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By January 1804, Saint-Domingue—the ‘pearl of the Antilles’—had been lost to colonial France and the independence of the newly-named ‘Haiti’ had been declared. This paper argues that where the majority of contemporary observers framed the Haitian Revolution in discussions of slavery, others emphasised the perceived failures of the French as evidence that the New World represented a geo-political space in which traditional forms of governance demanded re-evaluation. This paper focuses on the work of two writers who witnessed the Revolution first-hand and who argue that the biggest mistake France made was appointing leaders who were ill suited to the unique demands of the New World. For these two authors, the perceived mishandling of the Revolution by the French drastically called into question what constituted effective and legitimate governance in the Americas and served to provide pertinent lessons for leadership in Britain’s colonies and the early American republic.

This study discusses upward social mobility in the Chinese community in Port of Spain of Trinidad, a British colony in the Caribbean, in the first half of the twentieth century. It examines how the Chinese there attempted to be socially successful by showcasing or downplaying their Chinese heritage depending on the social and historical conditions. The upward social movement of the Chinese in Trinidad occurred considerably earlier than in other communities in the Americas. The Chinese accomplished this by using British colonial conditions as early as the 1910s through economic success in colonial commercialism, through the acquisition of highly skilled jobs thanks to their British education, and through creolization resulting from interracial marriages. The Sino-Japanese War of 1937 afforded another channel for Chinese upward social movement in Trinidad. The Chinese community in Port of Spain was at its peak of population growth and social development in the 1920–30s, and the layered community structure was developed through difference in language, generation, class, and political access to the British colonial or Chinese authorities. During the pre-war period, Chinese residents embedded in this community pluralism experienced a unique integration into Trinidadian upper-middle class society. The news pieces in the Chinese news section of the Trinidad Guardian highlight their Westernization, middle-class status, and their origins in China, which made them allies of the British. The documents studied in this article also demonstrate that the Chinese Nationalist Party (kmt) strove to strengthen its ties with Chinese residents of Trinidad in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We know relatively little about enslaved men, especially African-born men in British West Indian slave societies, in their roles as fathers and husbands within slave households. A generation of scholarship on gender in slave societies has tended to neglect enslaved men, thus allowing old understandings of enslaved men as not very involved with families drawn from biased planter sources to continue to shape scholarship. This article instead draws on a rich set of records (both quantitative and qualitative) from Berbice in British Guiana between 1819 and 1834 to explore enslaved men’s roles within informal marriages and as husbands and parents. We show not only that enslaved men were active participants in shaping family life within British West Indian slave societies but that they were aided and abetted in achieving some of their familial objectives by a sympathetic plantation regime in which white men favored enslaved men within enslaved households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how health facilities and services were used as an agency of worker control in the British Caribbean between 1838 and 1860. It argues that planter health strategies were based on flawed assumptions. The resultant policy of deprivation of access to medical services by the labouring population backfired within 16 years of freedom when a cholera epidemic rocked the region. It exposed the poor living conditions of the free villages and generated fear and panic among the local elite who were forced to make policy changes regarding health and sanitation. As a result the first steps towards the establishment of public health services in the British Caribbean were stimulated.Examina o uso de instalações e serviços de saúde como instrumento de controle dos trabalhadores no Caribe britânico entre 1838 e 1860. Argumenta-se que as estratégias sobre a saúde adotadas pelos proprietários rurais baseavam-se em suposições inconsistentes. A decisão de privar a população trabalhadora de acesso a serviços médicos teve graves consequências: 16 anos após a abolição da escravidão uma epidemia de cólera abalou a região, desnudando as precárias condições de vida das aldeias libertas e gerando pânico na elite local, então forçada a fazer mudanças na política de saúde e saneamento. Só então foram estabelecidos os primeiros serviços de saúde pública no Caribe britânico.

This article examines British West Indian migration to the Colombian archipelago of San Andrés and Providence in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. While the United Fruit plantations, Panama Canal, oil fields in Venezuela, and railroad projects in Central America generated a strong demand for a large West Indian workforce, no such development took place on San Andrés and Providence. As a result, the profile of West Indian migration looks different than to the Spanish-speaking circum-Caribbean, with more professionals and merchants and fewer unskilled laborers. In the absence of mass migration, there was less hostility toward West Indian newcomers to San Andrés and Providence islands.

[Second and third pragraph] While much has been written on the significance of British Caribbean activists in various movements associated with black diaspora politics in the twentieth century, particularly their important roles in Pan-African struggles, little has been written on how the various British Caribbean colonies themselves were envisioned among diaspora activists and within the scope of black diaspora politics. Did such Caribbean activists, especially those interested in and connected to diasporic movements beyond the British Caribbean, and their African American and African counterparts forsake the British West Indies as a focus of political engagement for other lands and causes? If not, what was the place of “West Indian liberation” and nation building in the British Caribbean in relation to black diasporic struggles in the early twentieth century? This article address these questions through an examination of how the idea of a united “West Indian nation” (via a federation or closer union) among British Caribbean colonies was envisioned within black diaspora politics from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s, and the ways in which racial consciousness and motivations informed conceptualizations of such a nation among black political activists of the British Caribbean and other parts of the diaspora. This study argues that efforts to create a federation in the Anglophone Caribbean were much more than simply imperial or regional nation-building projects. Instead, federation was also a diasporic, black nation-building endeavor intricately connected to notions of racial unity, racial uplift, and black self-determination.

Focusses on the lectures and theories of economist and colonial bureaucrat Herman Merivale on the imperial transition of British colonialism from slave labour to free labour, and toward free trade, in 1839. Author specifically shows how Merivale propagated the free trade imperialism of the reformed British Empire by using the "Black Legend" way of thinking, i.e. criticizing Spanish colonialism, to caricaturize the second British Empire, and thus justify imperial policy reforms. Author elaborates on this Black Legend tradition, going back to writings of Las Casas, and how it served as justification for "better" imperialisms of other colonial powers than Spain, and how Merivale's views followed this tradition. He shows how Merivale as part of this criticized the mismanagement, slavery, brutality, mercantilism, and the concentration of power and wealth in Cuba and other Spanish colonies, as negative examples contrasted to the British approach. Author points out, however, how Merivale's views were in part paradoxical and ambiguous, as he favoured a social hierarchy and an imperial authoritarianism limiting free labour.

Traces the changes in public attitudes toward and political stances on drug control in the British Caribbean between 1980 and 2000. Author first discusses the origins of drug control, the role of US pressure, and the vulnerability of the Caribbean. He then looks at European involvement and the different plans and policies to control drugs in the region. Finally, he describes the consequences of these policy approaches on the justice system and legal reform, drug demand, and social structures in the region.

This book forum focuses on Trevor Burnard's book, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (University of Chicago Press, 2015). In his book, Burnard argues that white men did not choose to develop and maintain the plantation system out of virulent racism or sadism, but rather out of economic logic. While plantations required racial divisions to exist, their successes were always measured in gold, rather than skin or blood. Burnard argues that the best example of plantations functioning as intended is not those found in the fractious and poor North American colonies, but those in their booming and integrated commercial hub, Jamaica. Ranging over nearly two centuries, from Guyana to the Chesapeake, the book provides many new insights and offers a revisionary interpretation of the connection between slavery and the American Revolution. The three reviewers in general praise the empirical research that underpins the book but challenge some of the conclusions. They also draw attention to a few points that, in their opinion, the author underem­phasized or where he could have expanded his argument, for instance the role of support from the British Empire to the plantation system and the role of religion in shaping attitudes to slavery and the plantation system. In his response, Burnard argues against some of the criticism, such as the impact of the fear of slave revolts. In particu­lar, Burnard stresses that his understanding of slavery in the colonial period of American history is that of an outsider to American politics. As such, he argues, his book does not speak to contemporary concerns about rising evidence of racial hatred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major obstacle to understanding Montserrat's sugar industry and the often-contentious social dynamics that accompanied it has been the absence of a comprehensive study of the small Caribbean island's plantation-era cultural landscape. We employ a multi-scalar approach, combining archival research and archaeological survey data, to trace the island's shifting socio-cultural composition and fluctuating sugar industry over the course of two centuries (ca. 1650-1850). Adopting an island-wide perspective on the interpretation of Montserrat's plantation-era remains, we expand the breadth and depth of understandings about the island's sugar society through comparative, multi-sited analyses. Our findings underscore the importance of extending Caribbean plantation studies beyond individual estates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reviews the laws devised by the imperial government to dismantle the slave labor system in the period 1823-38 in order to locate the moment of articulation between chattel and wage slavery. According to the author, the distinguishing feature of these new laws was that the workers lost the right to labor bargaining. Abolition brought free status and civil rights, but the new labor system was not less rigorous.

[First paragraph] The Art of Kamau Brathwaite. STEWART BROWN (ed.). Bridgend, Wales: Seren/Poetry Wales Press, 1995. 275 pp. (Cloth US$ 50.00, Paper US$ 22.95) Atlantic Passages: History, Community, and Language in the Fiction of Sam Selvon. MARK LOOKER. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. x + 243 pp. (Cloth n.p.) Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History. SUPRIYA NAIR. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. viii + 171 pp. (Cloth US$ 34.50) Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life. LlZABETH PARAVISINI-GEBERT. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. xii + 335 pp. (Cloth US$ 55.00, Paper US$ 18.95) Of the four books to be considered here, those on Brathwaite, Selvon, and Lamming fit snugly together into a natural category of literature that has to do with the emergence of a Creole or African-centered Caribbean culture, and related issues of race, color, class, history, and nationality. The fourth is a biography of Phyllis Shand Allfrey, a white West Indian, who is of an altogether different race, color, and class than from the other three. Yet the four books are linked together by nationality, for Allfrey and the others are all citizens of one region, the English-speaking West Indies, which, as the Federation of the West Indies between 1958 and 1962, formed a single nation.

Analysis of 119 English-language cookbooks (1890-1997) published in or having to do with the Caribbean. This study of the history of cookbooks indicates what it means to be Caribbean or to identify with some smaller territory or grouping and how this meaning has changed in response to social and political developments. Concludes that cookbook-writers have not been successful in creating a single account of the Caribbean past or a single, unitary definition of Caribbean cuisine or culture.

Argues that the connection between political fragmentation and offshore financial services illustrate an increasingly common vision of the political and economic future among leaders of the British Caribbean who seek to carve out a place for their countries and territories in the new global economy. Their success is based on standing outside regional federations and providing services to parties wishing to conduct business between or around economic blocs.

[First paragraph] An Area of Conquest: Popular Democracy and West Indies Cricket Supremacy. HILARY McD BECKLES (ed.). Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995. xviii + 154 pp. (Paper n.p.) Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture. HILARY McD BECKLES & BRIAN STODDART (eds.). Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995. xii + 403 pp. (Paper n.p.) We discovered cricket's importance in the English-speaking Caribbean nearly thirty years ago when we took up our first post in the West Indies. Exploring the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies, we were alarmed to observe so many people who appeared to be hearing-disabled. Wherever we went we found people with ear-pieces who were slightly distracted and at the same time prone to violent mood swings, ranging from the depths of despair to enormous elation. Uncertain about the meaning of what we observed, but reluctant, as newcomers, to reveal our ignorance of public health problems in the region, we delayed inquiring about hearing disabilities until we could confide our concerns to a trusted friend. At first convulsed with laughter, she finally recovered sufficiently to assure us that the people of the West Indies did not suffer disproportionately from hearing loss. Rather, the large numbers of people with ear-pieces were listening to a cricket test match!

[First paragraph] The Cuba Commission Report: A Hidden History of the Chinese in Cuba. The Original English-Language Text of 1876 (Introduction by Denise Helly). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. viii + 160 pp. (Paper US$21.95) Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838-1918. WALTON LOOK LAI. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. xxviii + 370 pp. (Cloth US$ 39.95) The world system formed by European mercantile and industrial capitalism and the history of transcontinental labor migrations from Africa to the Americas have been amply documented. The genesis, evolution, and demise of New World slavery are subjects much scrutinized and debated, particularly since the 1960s. Enjoying a less extensive tradition of historiography are the variously devised alternative labor schemes that came on the heels of emancipation: the colonially-orchestrated efforts to contract free and voluntary workers to take the place of slaves in a system of production theoretically the moral antithesis of that earlier "peculiar institution." Yet scholarship on indentured labor systems has consistently revealed that the "freedom" of immigrant workers was merely nominal, the "voluntary" nature of their commitments arguable, and the indenture projects often only ideally a kinder, gentier form of labor extraction.

[First paragraph] Criticisms, however strongly expressed, are valuable where they extend and deepen debates. Pieter Emmer's critique, though, is so ill focused, ill informed, and intemperate, that it is difficult to know how to respond profitably, or even politely.

[First lines] It is very difficult to operate within the plantation economy paradigm (Best 1968; Beckford 1972; Girvan 1973), and treat history as subject to change. This was the substance of my critique in my article in NWIG 68 (pp. 77-99). lts empirical subject matter dealing with the lived experiences of smallholders (popularly designated Caribbean folk) demonstrated the limitations of the plantation paradigm in exploring the rich lives of Caribbean working peoples. I am one of several analysts who has made my discomfort with the paradigm clear and so there have been numerous critiques (Bernstein & Pitt 1974; Sudama 1979). I will cite only the most salient given the nature of this exercise.

[First paragraph] In her contribution to NWIG 68 (1994:77-99), "An Alternative Approach to Family Land Tenure in the Anglophone Caribbean," Michaeline Crichlow posits an "institutional-structural" school comprising Edith Clarke, M.G. Smith and myself, supported by Yvonne Acosta and Jean Casimir, to which she sees Charles V. Carnegie, Lesley McKay and herself as counterposed. M.G. Smith (1965:221), citing Clarke, identifies "two highly distinct systems of land tenure ... found side by side in many British Caribbean societies," and uses these "institutional distinctions" to support his plural society thesis; "similarly Besson (1979), who is primarily interested in the origins of family land tenure and sees it as emanating out of conflicts between planters and peasants, commits a similar error of treating family land as an institution" (p. 79).

Analysis of a century of (evolutionary) socio-economic transition in the British Caribbean. According to the author, this process demonstrated aspects of a continuum, rather than sharply marked phases and abrupt changes. Before the abolition of slavery slaves behaved as proto-peasants and proto-proletarians and many aspects of slavery survived the abolition.

Questions why the West India Royal Commission of 1897 was considered necessary when serious distress already existed in the 1880s. Author argues that riots caught the government's attention much more readily than statistical data. Even minor disturbances could have distracted London from its preoccupation with the newer, more important parts of the Empire.

The Wembley British Empire Exhibition of 1924 familiarized the public with the resources and products of the Empire. In this decade of severe economic dislocation and indebtness attention was now focused on the commercial value of the colonies rather than on the jingoism of earlier exhibitions.

Reviews the research tradition in the social sciences in the post-War Anglophone Caribbean. Painting a general picture of the intellectual climate in the social sciences divisions of the UWI, Carnegie concludes that most studies have dealt with economic and macro-sociological topics. Moreover, there has been a consistent emphasis on the larger nations of the British Caribbean.

[First paragraph] The women of Azua: work and family in the rural Dominican Republic, by BARBARA FINLAY. New York: Praeger, 1989. xi + 190 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00) The psychosocial development of Puerto Rican women, edited by CYNTHIA T. GARCIA COLL & MARIA DE LOURDES MATTEI. New York: Praeger, 1989. xiii + 272 pp. (Cloth US$ 45.00) Women and the sexual division oflabour in the Caribbean, edited by KEITH HART. Mona, Jamaica: Consortium Graduate School of Social Sciences, UWI, 1989. 141 pp. (Paper n.p.) The three books under review work have a common theme: the impact of changing gender expectations on Caribbean women. The authors are mainly concerned with recent political and economie changes that might have contributed to either the improvement or deterioration of women's status in these societies. The questions raised by the contributors are strikingly similar: What has been the impact of dependent economie development on women's lives and has this resulted in increased labor participation (a problem explored for rural Dominican women as well as for Jamaican and Barbadian women) or in the migration to metropolitan centers, with its psychosocial consequences (an issue raised for Puerto Rican women living in the United States)? If patriarchal values (often referred to as traditional values) prevail in these societies, then what impact might wage work, migration, or improved education have on those values? Could it be the disintegration of the nuclear family with an increased proportion of female-headed households (Hart), higher rates of mental illness as a result of dysfunctional aceulturation (Garcia Coll and Mattei), or even an improvement of women's status within their families and communities (Finlay)?

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS)) is the property of Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS)) is the property of Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this article, I focus on Sunday Serenade, a British Caribbean club for the 'over 30s' in north-west London. Given how the participants identify with expressive music and dance practices from their Caribbean 'homeland', I commence by examining the extent to which Raymond Williams' (1973) concept of 'residual cultures' can be a useful lens through which to examine how Sunday Serenade is constructed as distinct from a dominant white culture. Yet in response, I argue that Williams' model produces a static understanding of culture that fails to recognise the complex staging of the participants' contemporary British lives. Therefore, I draw upon critical race studies and diaspora theory to explore how the participants of Sunday Serenade refuse to be contained within a discourse of sameness through their engagement with transnational music and dance practices, but promote a corporeality that is economically, culturally and socially distinct. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ambiguous place of medical assistants--dispensers--in a post-slavery British Caribbean colony, British Guiana, from the end of slavery in the 1830s to the early twentieth century. Although the latter were crucial to the functioning of the colonial medical system, local physicians resented them, complaining about the economic threat they posed and at times condemning them as quacks. These attacks were part of a wider discussion about the composition of the medical profession and the role of medical auxiliaries in colonial society, and to an extent, they echoed debates conducted in other jurisdictions in this period. But in the British Caribbean, this discussion was significantly different. There, long-standing views about obeah--an Afro- Creole medico-religious practice--as a particularly dangerous and uncivilised type of quackery was part of the discursive context. That those participating in this debate included African-descended physicians whose arrival in the medical profession was recent and contested demonstrates the vexed and complex nature of professionalisation in a post-slavery society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates the changes of foreign policies in Jamaica. Stages on the foreign policy changes; Characterization of Jamaican foreign policy; Membership of Jamaica in the Third World country identity.