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Octagonal shell mosaics--colloquially known as sailors' valentines--were produced in a cottage industry by black and brown Barbadian women for the burgeoning Caribbean tourism industry in the Victorian era. As a commercial colonial craft, sailors' valentines have been occluded in art historical discourse. Nevertheless, these vibrant collages foreground the multivalent significance of creolised material culture circulating within modernising colonial economies. Through their artful assemblage of shells, they not only embody the legacy of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and the picturesque movement, but also reflect diasporic West African spiritual and aesthetic practices engaged in creating an Afro-Barbadian cultural autonomy within a plantation society. This article traces the material evolution of sailors' valentines from their origins in British conchology and craft to their implication in the rise of international seaside leisure. Honing in on the adaptation of shell mosaics in the Victorian Caribbean as object emissaries of a post-emancipation island tourism economy, it considers how they were engaged in rebranding the British West Indies as a consumable natural wonderland. The article concludes with an assessment of contemporary sailors' valentines that invoke the creolisation of Barbadian shell mosaics to negotiate global cultural interchange, while critiquing the environmental legacy of the Victorian consumption of nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 1865 has served a temporal marker of freedom in both the USA and the Caribbean. For African Americans who sought various means to escape the travails of an American slave society, 1865 symbolized the possibilities for a future secured by legislation. By contrast, instead of optimism, 1865 in the British Caribbean signaled demise, failure, and gloomy prospects for the future of an already 30-year-old emancipation legislation passed by parliament. It thereby came to mark a point of renewed resistance. While the Morant Bay Rebellion played a prominent role in symbolizing the failures of the 1833 Emancipation Act in Jamaica, everyday Barbadians had maintained the quest for liberty in the years leading up to 1865 and after. Indeed, as a point of legislative, economic and political collapse, the 1865 upheaval, by serving as a highpoint, reveals the connections between everyday resistance that flanked both sides. Viewing the failures of the emancipation legislation through the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, a temporally specific and spatially bounded phenomenon, would be to dismiss the quotidian efforts of the different social groups as they pushed against the boundaries erected around freedom. By exploring the different motivations and calculations by which different groups of Barbadians came to view migration as desirable after both 1834 and 1865, this essay shows how 1865 instead served as a point of continuity for different social classes in Barbados who had long used mobility to vigorously reimagine and transgress the boundaries around freedom throughout the long nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early modern era, the hinterland of a Caribbean island encompassed more than the land sequestered by its sandy shorelines. This article uses the loggers of Barbados and the turtlers of Jamaica to explore how Caribbean colonists forged and maintained maritime hinterlands in order to supply island residents and feed urban populations. In timbering nearby islands and harvesting adjacent waterscapes, loggers and turtlers forged an interisland web of ecological and economic relationships that inextricably linked proximate islands to one another. Barbadians, for example, depended on timber from St. Lucia, and Jamaicans provisioned Port Royal with turtles from the Cayman Islands. In both instances, colonists and local officials claimed these nearby islands as "dependencies" of the larger colony and sought to defend them. By reorienting our understanding of hinterlands from interior lands to neighboring islands and seascapes, this article offers a new way of thinking about port cities, sufficiency, and industry, especially in plantation America. Rather than peripheral trades with little economic value, ventures such as timbering and turtling promoted vernacular industries, which in turn reduced reliance on imported goods, thereby enabling the islands of Barbados and Jamaica to become efficient, populous colonies within a profitable Atlantic empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on small pox epidemic in the British Caribbean during 1902-1904 in context of intercolonial relations. Topics discussed include how the outbreak of epidemic aggravated the problems inherited from the 19th century posing further challenges for these territories; the controversy it stimulated between Barbados and Trinidad; and examines the course of and response to the disease in both colonies.

In a rapid shift between the 1920s and 1940s, British imperial policy went from paying almost no attention to child-rearing among colonized populations to hailing family order among the colonized as essential to economic progress and social stability. The shift resulted from the intersection of processes occurring on three different scales: global scientific and ideological developments, transimperial gendered professionalization, and local social and political struggles. This paper illuminates those multi-scalar dynamics by examining a specific subfield of empire, the British Caribbean. As riots and general strikes in Trinidad, Barbados, Jamaica, and other colonies shook the imperial order in the late 1930s, metropolitan observers discovered the “native” family as the crucial incubator of proper working-class citizens. This article uses British Caribbean newspapers and unpublished Colonial Office correspondence generated by the 1938–39 West India Royal Commission (Moyne Commission) to make visible the global and transatlantic dialogs that brought the “problem” of the Caribbean family to the forefront of policy debate. Although imperial rule would not last, the pathologization of Caribbean parenting would prove painfully persistent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The Carnegie Free Library in Barbados was the first public library erected outside of the Americas or the United Kingdom. At the time it was a significant achievement, despite the political and economic climate that existed in the early 1900s in the British West Indies. It was post-emancipation and the colonies were struggling to survive after the brutal period of slavery. The events that led to the erection of a public library in Barbados are worth telling and evidence is available in various publications. There is, however, no comprehensive documentation of the events. The gap needs to be filled and this article is an attempt to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]