Search

This article focuses on the local defense threat posed by German commerce raiders and warships operating in or near the Caribbean between August 1914 and May 1915, when the War Office sanctioned recruitment in the Caribbean for what would eventually become the British West Indies Regiment. We argue that in addition to institutional racism and other factors, the War Office's decision to begin recruiting Black West Indians in May 1915 should be understood within a larger strategic context, and ongoing discussions between the War Office, the Colonial Office, and the Admiralty, about the German naval threat to the British West Indies and the safety of Britain's overseas possessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the manuscript diary of a Scottish doctor, Jonathan Troup, who during a truncated fifteen-month period, from 1789 to 1790, practised medicine on the island of Dominica, part of the climatic 'torrid zone' in the British West Indies. While the relevant textual contents of his diary are already familiar to scholars of medical humanities, the analysis seeks to complement and extend these existing discussions by addressing an aspect of the illustrated and inscribed pages of Troup's diary that has not been previously discussed, namely his diurnal account of race-making. The article argues that Troup was a product of Scottish enlightenment medical training, with its blended curricula of medicine, natural history and moral philosophy. The diary in turn, is shown to be a product of the diagnostic tools of that education, which equipped practitioners with the skills to classify human diversity through careful observation in the 'colonial field'. In his diurnal sketches, Troup employs a tiered racial system or calculus of colour to differentiate between peoples of different races, based on the visual proximity of their skin to either European whiteness or shades of blackness associated with African descent. In the textual descriptions that variously accompany, envelope, elucidate and ignore the drawings, Troup's race-making schema is shown to be informed by factors other than the gradations of skin complexion, including social temper and moral temperament. Such factors are given particular prominence in his discussion of multi-racial women, making gender an innate constituent of his race-making schema. The article is framed by the concept of business, which for most professionals in the Caribbean involved more than one economic occupation. It offers a prognosis as to the significance of Troup's diary for a range of academic disciplines, historical, literary and visual, and their discreet historiographies which pertain to his imperial careering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several jurisdictions in the Commonwealth Caribbean have undertaken reform and modernisation of their insolvency legislation. The dominant model for the new enactments has been Canada's federal statute, the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act, RSC 1985, which has already been transplanted into six jurisdictions of the region. The transplantation has introduced lexicon which, while part of the vocabulary of the old statutes for personal insolvency, has, traditionally, been unfamiliar to the region's corporate insolvency law, hence the phrase, '"old–new" lexicon', in the title. This article examines the meanings of some of this lexicon, particularly 'bankruptcy' and cognate terms, including 'acts of bankruptcy'. The examination extends to the term 'receiving order', operationally related to bankruptcy. Legal interpretation of the terms is enriched in the discussion by insights from linguistics. While showing that the importation of these terms into the region's corporate insolvency law is semantically problematic, the article elucidates the signification of the terms. It points out that some of the 'old–new' terms may tend to reduce the efficacy in the contemplated lay administration of the statutes. It also warns that the 'old–new' lexicon threatens to undermine key goals of the reform exercise, suggesting a need for deeper scrutiny in the transplantation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with the decline of British West Indian plantations and a growing abolitionist tide, Foreign Secretary George Canning embarked upon the policy of amelioration in 1823 with the aim of eradicating the worst excesses of British plantation slavery. Scholars have regarded the rise of ameliorationism within a British imperial framework, neglecting Canning's use of a modernized consular service in this policy's promotion, and obscuring its transnational links to other Caribbean locations. This paper argues that Canning's flagship consular intervention, Britain's consulate-general at the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, became a major factor in the advancement of colonial amelioration. Charles Mackenzie, the British consul-general to Haiti, adhered to Canning's ameliorationism, despite Haitian officials' active attempts to enlist his support in the recognition and legitimation of their radical emancipatory project. Mackenzie's mission undermined the abolitionist cause, reinforced the policy of planter indemnification, and facilitated the marginalization of Haiti in the Atlantic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 article discusses the use of constitutionally mandated referendums to vote on constitutional reforms in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Topics discussed include a comparison of mandatory and non-mandatory referendums, levels of entrenchment of Caribbean constitutions, and the failed mandatory referendums in St. Vincent, the Grenadines and Antigua and Barbuda which aimed at amending the basic structure of their constitutions.

This article explores encounters between U.S. tourists and British imperial actors in the British West Indies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Drawing on published traveller accounts from the period, it argues that literary cross-fertilization and practices of colonial sociability encouraged shared understandings of the Caribbean framed around visions of global white supremacy. Although these supported the Anglo-Saxonist project that underpinned the geopolitical rapprochement between the two powers between the 1890s and First World War, there were also tensions and disagreements, especially over which nation was best placed to defend the racial order in the Caribbean in the new century. As the volume of U.S. tourists grew, these disagreements became clearer, as revealed in the accounts given of the aftermath of the diplomatic crisis that followed the Kingston earthquake of 1907. Traveller accounts on the ground contrasted with efforts in Washington and London to resolve the crisis amicably. In this sense, the cultural politics of inter-imperial sociability did not always perfectly align with geopolitical imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article builds on the work of Walter Rodney, Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman, Diana Paton, and others who have investigated the complexities of post-slavery societies in the Caribbean. It addresses the dynamics of resistance and the re-working of legal and cultural processes that took place in the half-century following emancipation. Whereas indenture plays a tertiary role in these previous analyses, it is the central concern of this article. Through a close examination of the 1872 killing of five indentured Indian workers on the Devonshire Castle plantation, I analyse how the institution of indenture restructured the interrelation of the colonial state, labour control and violence in British Guiana. I consider the killings not only in the context typically employed by Caribbean historians to examine race, labour and violence—that of slave rebellions and African-Caribbean revolts in the post-emancipation era—but also in relation to the 1857 Indian Rebellion and in the context of an Empire-wide narrative that justified violent state repression against colonised peoples. Although this is largely a microhistorical account, I hope to provide some useful avenues of analysis by which indenture (primarily approached until now through the lens of social history) can be more broadly engaged as an institution that catalysed a new relationship between the state and labour management, that fostered new (or, at least, revised) discourses of the role of violence in colonialism, and that generated new patterns of response and resistance among subalterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores women's engagement with food production and distribution in Tobago from 1840 to 1940. Scholars such as Raymond Smith have suggested that freedom in the British West Indies meant "the withdrawal of female labor from plantation work." In Tobago, while women fled the estates, they did not abandon working the land. In fact, working the land and selling food was critical to the sustenance and survival of women and their families. Among Afro-Tobagonian women, food became a tool of power and empowerment. Through the production and sale of food, Afro-Tobagonian women asserted control over resources, steered the economic empowerment of their families, and crafted identities as autonomous beings. This article, undergirded by archival documents and oral testimonies, refines our understanding of women's mobility and labor experiences in Tobago, and by extension, the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In British West African and Caribbean colonies in the 1930s fascism felt urgently close to people's lived reality. Grappling with the nature of fascism, by comparing it with their lived reality under colonialism, became a site of critical intellectual debate. Yet genealogies of ideas about fascism have overwhelmingly tended to historicise and theorise fascism's intellectual history from Europe. Histories that include arguments about fascism by colonised people nevertheless leave the impression that these debates occurred primarily among a few intellectuals living in metropolitan spaces, rather than in the colonies themselves. By mining newspapers as sites of intellectual debate, this article shows that questions about the relationship between colonialism and fascism encompassed broad plebeian and intellectual participants in a range of spaces. Their debate revises our intellectual genealogy of fascism by confirming that anti-colonialism was foundational to anti-fascism. It also revises our understanding of fascism. The embodied knowledge articulated by colonised peoples helps decipher fascism as excess by reconfiguring the very relationship between fascism and other political ideologies from one of polarities to one of proximity. When fascism is viewed from the perspective of colonised peoples, the base and root from which its excess springs comes into sharper relief [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trafficking in persons is a crime and a human rights violation that affects most states across the globe, including those in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Therefore, in the last twenty years, governments have rushed to enact anti-trafficking laws with a level of alacrity the international community has never seen before. While the enactment of these laws is both necessary and desirable, some have pushed the limits of what is constitutionally permissible in a free and democratic society. This article demonstrates that some of the prosecution provisions of anti-trafficking norms enacted by Caribbean governments have encroached or threaten to encroach upon the constitutional rights of accused persons. It concludes that unconstitutional provisions of regional anti-trafficking laws need to be addressed by regional governments as a matter of urgency, as they can potentially be challenged by traffickers with the result being that, if successfully challenged, traffickers may escape liability for crimes they have committed on mere technicalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using alderman William Beckford (1709–1770) as a microhistorical case study, this essay analyses the interconnectedness of polite masculinity, Englishness, and whiteness in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. It argues that Beckford's failure to perform gentlemanliness made him vulnerable to politically motivated racialised attacks. Analysing a variety of polemical texts by Beckford's political opponents, the essay suggests that gendered performances of politeness played a crucial and thus far underresearched role in the racialisation of white West Indians. Beckford's case shows that as an identity yet untethered to biology, white Englishness could be both compensated and endangered by performative displays of polite cultural capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the British West Indies beginning with the involvement of African Caribbean soldiers in the Great War. It challenges the enduring myth of the First World War as a predominantly white European conflict. The main part focuses on C. L. R. James, the Trinidadian historian and playwright, following his paradigmatic trajectory from the colony to the 'mother country' and his involvement in the protracted transnational process of decolonization after the First Word War. It concentrates on one of his political pamphlets and on his play Toussaint Louverture. The work of the British writer and left-wing political activist Nancy Cunard is also presented as another 'outsider' text which can further an ongoing methodological project: the re-integration and cross-fertilization of received knowledge about the war with seemingly outlying knowledge, unorthodox political commitment and challenging aesthetics to produce a richer understanding of this formative period across the Atlantic divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the transition of the Trinidad and Tobago State from a minimalist role in the development of sport to a more interventionist one in the period 1947–2019 based on documentary sources, while also examining some of the social, political and economic factors that facilitated or shaped this process. To this end, it is structured around two broad periods, a colonial period marked by British rule and a post-colonial period after independence was granted in 1962, which is itself sub divided into 4 periods. In examining this transition, particular attention is paid to the early arms-length, almost apolitical approach of the state to sport, the role of foreign business companies, civil society and the gradual change towards sport following political independence in relation to its (re)positioning in the State apparatus, policy formulation, implementation, funding and facility development. The consequences of greater State involvement in sport in relation to the (over)dependence of the non-profit sector on state funding, the priority given to elite sport and the management of billion dollar sport facilities are also interrogated, together with the ongoing issues of the under-involvement of the local private sector in sport, the lack of sport research and the governance of some of the various National Sport Organizations (NSOs). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of incorporation of joint-stock companies were far lower between 1790 and 1860 than in the American South, let alone New England and the British Isles, suggesting that slavery had a direct and proportional impact on patterns of incorporation and wider economic development. Examining the foundation of the Close Harbour Company of Jamaica between 1795 and 1803, the first joint-stock company chartered by a colonial legislature in the British West Indies, shows that potential entrepreneurs did not face legal or political obstacles, but rather a range of exogenous and endogenous economic factors arising in part from the conditions of a slave society which discouraged company formation. The effect may have been to exacerbate existing levels of economic backwardness in these islands by cutting off the supplies of capital needed for modernisation, thereby contributing to their underdevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how debates and policies concerning the nutritional standards of West Indian slaves were shaped by comparisons to the eating habits of other laboring and impoverished groups in early nineteenth-century Britain and the empire. Planters and abolitionists argued over the relative adequacy of slaves' sustenance vis-à-vis European laborers since at least the late eighteenth century. Proslavery figures insisted that the supposed ease of procuring subsistence in tropical colonies rendered such comparisons largely moot. However, abolitionists increasingly mobilized data on the food consumption of English agricultural workers, paupers, prisoners, and other subjects in order to prove that the typical rations given to many slaves in the sugar colonies created conditions of malnourishment and population decline. Abolitionists' empirical efforts to quantify slaves' sustenance influenced policies crafted by the Colonial Office to establish a universal scale of food allowances for enslaved laborers on the eve of emancipation--one of the most advanced dietary reforms concerning a laboring population in the early nineteenth-century British Empire. Although the Colonial Office's ration was implemented only partially throughout the slave colonies, the questions that it sparked about what constituted adequate nourishment for plantation labor shaped subsequent debates over the Emancipation Act (1833) and the Apprenticeship System (1834-38). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has further weakened the fragile socio-economic fabric of the Commonwealth Caribbean (CC). Economies have been stifled by 'lockdowns', and by a global decline in travel and tourism. The result has been higher levels of indebtedness, unemployment and psychological stress, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations throughout the region. Despite their limited size and resources, CC states have sought to support business and individuals alike, stimulate economic activity and preserve livelihoods. In this article, the authors acknowledge multilateral and regional policy responses, and argue that the present scenario offers opportunities to deepen functional cooperation and build resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The punishment of hair-cropping for use on female prisoners was the subject of considerable disagreement in the British Caribbean during the post-emancipation era. Reform-minded colonial administrators thought the punishment was barbaric, whereas others believed that it was the only suitable means of disciplining unruly female inmates. The robust debate over hair cropping furnishes a lens through which to analyze competing visions of colonial rule at a moment of British imperial expansion. Moreover, the records of this debate provide critical insight into Caribbean women's relationships with their bodies and conceptions of gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Comparativ: Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und Vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung is the property of Leipziger Universitaetsverlag GmbH 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.)

Intent on preserving their plantations, eighteenth-century British slaveholders created a rhetoric that naturalized African labor in the Caribbean. Examining this history demonstrates the ways in which slavery and the environment are deeply entwined. In the late eighteenth century, West Indian planters began to fear for the long-term future of their plantations on two fronts. First, planters suspected that their enthusiasm for clear-cutting in attempts to maximize cropland had reduced precipitation and made the climate drier. While medical theories held that less rainfall was beneficial to human health, crops began to suffer from drought conditions. Second, parliamentary hearings on the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade threatened the labor supply on plantations. Seeking to preserve the trade, planters argued that only Africans could perform difficult labor, including clearing wooded land, in the West Indies. A close examination of planters' writings demonstrates that their arguments for African labor were in fact early articulations of environmental racism, as they deliberately placed black bodies in environmentally hazardous situations. Considering climatic change and abolition debates together shows how race is essential to the environmental history of the West Indies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the history of the Caribbean peoples, their traumas, migrations, and their endeavors to recreate a collective cultural identity and go beyond their de-homing status. It focuses on the emergence of a resistant Caribbean literature that has helped in raising the voice of the Caribbean peoples. It conveys their yearnings, anxieties, and confusions, suggesting both geographic displacement and psychological dislocation. Within a post-colonial world that has remained dependent and underdeveloped, migration to Europe became an inevitable process. West Indian writers joined these successive waves of arriving migrants initiating a literature of exile. Later, several exiled post-colonial writers rejected the status of exile in favor of that of a migrant. This shift to the immigrant genre resulted in the writer's acceptance of his or her duality and ambivalence. In this study, the focus of research is to be narrowed down to Anglo-Caribbean writers and those of British West Indies. Hence, this approach to history adopts a descriptive documentary method, based on decisive incidents in the lives of these diasporic people. It relies, as well, on the opinions of theoreticians, writers, and scholars. The findings of this study indicated that Caribbean resistance, in the face of racism and marginalization, is an ongoing process in our contemporary world. They also showed an apparent revival of Caribbean writing, which scholars expect to play a role in enriching and adding to the British and American literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay surveys the proposals of slavery reform advanced by two important figures of British and French imperial developments between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries: the administrators, planters, and proslavery thinkers Edward Long and Pierre-Victor Malouet. Long and Malouet applied modern political theory to the government of plantation society in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue. Their concerns about the practical difficulties of plantation management in an age of increasingly recurring revolts by the enslaved led them to formulate schemes of slavery amelioration which, by transforming the slaves into perpetual servants, would preserve the order of colonial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the ways in which the bodies of enslaved people were portrayed in Barbadian and Jamaican runaway advertisements from 1718 to 1815 to demonstrate that disability was key to slavery's violence. Runaway advertisements indicate that enslaved people were debilitated in a variety of ways: discursively through law and legally sanctioned punishment, work regimes, and the material conditions of slavery. But they did more than merely reflect the presence of disability among the enslaved: they comprised a system of oppression that actually produced disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phosphatic limestones on the west end of Little Cayman, at an elevation of 3 to 4 m above sea level and ca 320 to 550 m inland of the coast, lie on top of a phytokarst surface that defines the upper boundary of the Pedro Castle Formation (Pliocene). These phosphatic limestones are formed of phosphatic lithoclasts, detrital phosphate grains, coated grains (glaebules), composite coated grains, biofragments and phosphate rafts that are held in a matrix that is formed of micrite, calcite cement, and non‐crystalline masses formed of P, Al, Si and Fe. The phosphate in these limestones is primarily hydroxylapatite, whereas the overlying soils, found in some areas, are formed of hydroxylapatite, crandallite and minor amounts of boehemite, kaolinite and quartz. Textures in the lithoclasts and detrital phosphate grains indicate that they were derived from older insular phosphates that that were largely removed by mining in 1890 to 1895. The coated grains (glaebules) typically have nuclei formed of a detrital phosphate grains that are encased by non‐crystalline cortical laminae that are composed primarily of Al with their variable red colour reflecting the variable Fe content. The phosphatic limestones developed in a low‐lying coastal area where the guano produced by a large seabird colony that was close to or mixed with terra rossa and marine carbonates that were washed onshore during storms/hurricanes. The Al, Fe, Si and rare earth elements found in the phosphatic limestones came from the terra rossa. Critically, this study documents the complex depositional regimes and diagenetic processes that can exist at the interface of marine carbonates, coastal phosphates and terrestrial soils as sea‐level fluctuations control phases of sediment accumulation that were periodically interrupted by periods of non‐deposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1950s, the metal collars on Ivanhoe’s serfs have been occupying literary historians. I argue that Gurth and Wamba’s collars owe as much to Abolitionist rhetoric as they do to antiquarianism. Comparing slavery with the repudiated institution of serfdom was a staple of Abolitionist discourse, and Abolitionists like Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson frequently confronted audiences with the physical restraints—including collars—used on enslaved Africans. When Ivanhoe was published in 1819, the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed—but slavery in the British West Indies was entirely legal. Simon J. White makes a persuasive identification of Ivanhoe’s Prince John with Britain’s Prince Regent. As I trace Abolitionist discourse through Ivanhoe, I examine the scenes of feasting on imported delicacies with Prince John in light of the Abolitionist boycott of West Indian sugar, rum, and produce, comparing Ivanhoe’s with other Regency feasts. My paper then focuses on the figure of Ulrica, an elderly female serf frequently referred to as a “Saxon witch”; her story suggests both the history of sexual violence directed particularly at female slaves and the role of Obeah in slave uprisings as she sings heathen Saxon songs while burning her captor’s castle down. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision of females to nest communally has important consequences for reproductive success. While often associated with reduced energetic expenditure, conspecific aggregations also expose females and offspring to conspecific aggression, exploitation, and infanticide. Intrasexual competition pressures are expected to favor the evolution of conditional strategies, which could be based on simple decision rules (i.e., availability of nesting sites and synchronicity with conspecifics) or on a focal individual's condition or status (i.e., body size). Oviparous reptiles that reproduce seasonally and provide limited to no postnatal care provide ideal systems for disentangling social factors that influence different female reproductive tactics from those present in offspring‐rearing environments. In this study, we investigated whether nesting strategies in a West Indian rock iguana, Cyclura nubila caymanensis, vary conditionally with reproductive timing or body size, and evaluated consequences for nesting success. Nesting surveys were conducted on Little Cayman, Cayman Islands, British West Indies for four consecutive years. Use of high‐density nesting sites was increasingly favored up to seasonal nesting activity peaks, after which nesting was generally restricted to low‐density nesting areas. Although larger females were not more likely than smaller females to nest in high‐density areas, larger females nested earlier and gained access to priority oviposition sites. Smaller females constructed nests later in the season, apparently foregoing investment in extended nest defense. Late‐season nests were also constructed at shallower depths and exhibited shorter incubation periods. While nest depth and incubation length had significant effects on reproductive outcomes, so did local nest densities. Higher densities were associated with significant declines in hatching success, with up to 20% of egg‐filled nests experiencing later intrusion by a conspecific. Despite these risks, nests in high‐density areas were significantly more successful than elsewhere due to the benefits of greater chamber depths and longer incubation times. These results imply that communal nest sites convey honest signals of habitat quality, but that gaining and defending priority oviposition sites requires competitive ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bryan Edwards's The History of the British West Indies is a text well known to historians of the Caribbean and the early modern Atlantic World. First published in 1793, the work is widely considered to be a classic of British Caribbean literature. This article introduces an unpublished first draft of Edwards's preface to that work. Housed in the archives of the West India Committee in Westminster, England, this preface has never been published or fully analyzed by scholars in print. It offers valuable insight into the production of West Indian history at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, it shows how colonial planters confronted the challenges of their day by attempting to wrest the practice of writing West Indian history from their critics in Great Britain. Unlike these metropolitan writers, Edwards had lived in the West Indian colonies for many years. He positioned his personal experience as being a primary source of his historical legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that disasters, usually induced by hurricanes, were a near-annual experience in the nineteenth-century British-controlled Caribbean, the immediate response of white elites (plantation owners and colonial officers) to these events has remained largely underexamined. This article fills that lacuna by examining the concerns that, across the long nineteenth century, informed British responses to some of the most devastating nature-induced disasters in this period. Though the damages wrought by these events always necessitated some form of humanitarian relief, across the period 1831–1907 the survival of labor regimes and the plantation economy always remained the paramount concern of British officials. White elites viewed their minority control over colonies in the region as contingent on their ability to make African-Caribbean people labor for them. Consequently, because disasters so often destroyed plantations and other sites of labor, colonial responses to disaster were primarily informed by a desire to coerce the African-Caribbean population back to work. Reflecting a preoccupation with "idleness" that was mirrored in domestic poor relief and disaster relief throughout the British Empire, white elites often attempted to withhold needed foodstuffs and materials for rebuilding from the African-Caribbean population until they re-engaged in labor for the colonial state. This article, through showing that a preoccupation with idleness remained central to colonial disaster response, reveals an underexamined continuity between the eras of slavery and emancipation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: In Anguilla, dental nurses are responsible for providing oral healthcare for children until they reach 18 years of age. This study determined the diagnostic conformity and consistency in caries assessment among dental nurses trained to carry out an oral health survey of 6, 12 and 15-year-old schoolchildren.Materials and Methods: Following training in caries diagnosis using slides, extracted teeth and visual-tactile examination, three dental nurses were calibrated by a benchmark examiner (BE) using modified WHO criteria. Conformity and consistency were assessed on four different occasions--on extracted teeth (T0) and in three different groups of children (at C0, D1 and D2) for subject (SB), tooth (TH) and surface (SF) using Kappa statistics.Results: Perfect agreement (kappa score of 1.0) was attained for all sound, decayed and filled lingual and buccal surfaces at D1 and D2 respectively. Levels of conformity (with and without BE) and consistency increased as the survey progressed. Accuracy level ranges for SB, TH and SF were .770-.935(T0), .895-.951(C0), .947-.989(D1) and .985-.993(D2) respectively. Kappa score of 1.0 was obtained by all three examiners for SB, TH and SF at D2. Identical accuracy levels were attained by all examiners for TH (.985) and SF (.993) at D2. Reliability levels for SB, TH and SF ranged from .972-.999(C0), .977-.996(D1) and was 1.0 at D2.Conclusions: Substantial and almost perfect inter and intraexaminer agreements were attained at calibration, and maintained throughout the survey. Dental nurses in Anguilla can conduct valid and reliable child oral health surveys when adequate and appropriate training is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article will discuss the rights of refugees in the Commonwealth Caribbean. It will first discuss the legal categorization of a "refugee" under international law and the extent to which the rights of the asylum seeker and a refugee particularly the principle of non-refoulement exist as customary international law. The article will then evaluate how Commonwealth Caribbean courts treat international law with respect to domestic law and within the State's constitutional paradigm. Thereafter, the article will examine the ways in which Commonwealth Caribbean courts may appropriately use both international treaty law and customary international law not only as an interpretive tool but also as a means to restrict the scope of the statutory provision. The article will finally demonstrate how international law and customary international law can be used to establish substantial protection in domestic law for those seeking asylum or for refugees in a situation where there are no domestic refugee regulations but where there is a written constitution. [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]

This article is a critical examination of the decisions of the Judicial Council of the Privy Council (JCPC) in death penalty appeals from the Commonwealth Caribbean from 1966 to 2008. It contributes to our understanding of how court rulings may be influenced by specific aspects of the judicial environment, which is shaped by the majority party in parliament, whose prime minister selects judges and which may make substantive changes in the law. In a quantitative examination of death penalty appeals, I find an increased likelihood that the court will set aside the death penalty when the judicial environment changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost half of the bicameral legislatures in the Commonwealth are located in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Why so many bicameral legislatures are located in a relatively small geographic region, which is composed of countries that manifest characteristics more usually associated with unicameralism—small size, a unitary state, and homogeneity—is puzzling. Scholars have offered two possible explanations. The first concerns the presumed wish of the region's political leaders upon independence to replicate the values and institutions of their colonial mentor, Britain. The second concerns the presumed need to prevent one-party dominance by guaranteeing the representation of opposition parties in the second chamber. This paper challenges both these explanations. By examining the origins of bicameralism in the region with the arrival of the first settlers in the seventeenth century, its demise during the era of crown colony rule in the nineteenth century, its renaissance in the 1950s and 1960s, and its survival in the post-independence era this paper will offer a more multi-layered explanation This entails taking account of the complex relationship between these former colonies and their imperial past, the wide range of views expressed both locally and within the Colonial Office about the suitability of bicameralism in the debates that accompanied the transition from colonial rule to independence, and, finally, the very distinctive nature of Caribbean bicameralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The small states of CARICOM operate within the sphere of US influence guided by its national interests. This geopolitical reality can become daunting when the major power is led by an ultra-conservative president who puts his country first at all times and has dubbed some developing countries 'shit holes'. The domestic and foreign policies of the Trump Administration may affect CARICOM in the areas of tourism, trade, climate change, migration, remittances, regional integration and development assistance among other areas. Despite these challenges, CARCIOM should take consistent, coordinated and principled foreign policy positions towards the US, which serve their national and regional interests. In addition, these states should look to BRICS, China and the Global South as alternatives. These governments should also implement the right economic policies, educate their citizens, reduce crime and corruption, make the civil service efficient, and improve productivity and the quality of governance to enhance economic growth and development. These achievements should increase the standing of CARICOM in the world and give it leverage with the US and other international partners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The youngest part of the Neogene carbonate succession on Little Cayman is a thin (<3 m), unconformity bounded package of friable Pleistocene grainstones that belong to Unit D of the Ironshore Formation. The basal unconformity separates it from the underlying Pliocene grainstones of the Pedro Castle Formation, whereas the upper bounding unconformity is the present-day land surface. The limestones in both formations have undergone extensive diagenesis with micritization and variable cementation of the grainstones in both formations, the creation of dissolution cavities and tunnels that are commonly filled with internal sediments (including terra rossa) or flowstone in the Pedro Castle Formation, rootcrete-lined plant-generated cavities in both formations, and terra rossa-filled fractures that cut through the entire succession. The negative δ18O and δ13C values of the grainstones and the diagenetic fabrics indicate diagenesis mediated by CO 2 -charged groundwater. Rare earth element (REE + Y) concentrations are low in the Pedro Castle Formation, higher in the limestones of the Ironshore Formation, and highest in the terra rossa. The REE profiles indicate that the REE in the limestones were derived from the overlying terra rossa via downward-percolating groundwater. Collectively, the diagenetic fingerprints found in this succession provide clear evidence of freshwater-mediated diagenesis, at all scales, that occurred during the sea level lowstands. Critically, the unconformity at the top of the Pedro Castle Formation acted as an aquitard that resulted in the REE being concentrated in the limestones of the overlying Ironshore Formation. These results highlight the complex processes that control the depositional and diagenetic evolution of limestones on isolated oceanic islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the ways in which Nonconformist missionaries joined with the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) to provide elementary instruction to enslaved and emancipated children in the nineteenth-century British West Indies. Using predominantly untapped historical sources from the BFSS archive's newly catalogued West Indian collection, this article seeks to address a long-standing historiographic gap regarding the pedagogic methods and practices employed by Nonconformist missionaries in the British Caribbean. In so doing, it highlights the combined impact that local conditions and global currents of missionary and educational fervour had on establishing an effective elementary system during the emancipation era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As demobilization gathered pace in 1919, the colonial authorities in both the British and French Caribbean fretted about the reintegration of thousands of men imagined to have been rendered volatile and dangerous by their time overseas. By 1939, however, the situation appeared quite different. Veterans in the British islands were restive and dissatisfied, while their French Caribbean counterparts were comparatively settled. This contrast was not simply about disparities in state generosity. Rather, the article explores how differing conceptions of the relationship between military service and citizenship shaped the actions of the colonial and imperial governments. Where the governments of Martinique and Guadeloupe helped to foster the growth of veterans' associations which were then incorporated into local policy-making and, more broadly, an imperial network of state aid, the British colonial authorities sought to suppress veteran identity in pursuit of the ultimately unachievable ideal of a final settlement with the demobilized men. An analysis of the interwar veterans' movements therefore opens up questions of colonial governance, citizenship, and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the configuration of cultural nationalism in the Commonwealth Caribbean, specifically Trinidad and Tobago, and the impact of queer formations on national identity. Cultural nationalism in the Caribbean has been characterized by its heteropatriarchal disposition - rendering sexual minorities as abject citizens. However, the hybridized culture of the Caribbean, as demonstrated through the cultural arts of Trinidad and Tobago, provides an unfixed, paradoxical social location in which queer cultural performances transgress the colonial-influenced cultural nationalism. As such, this essay deploys queer theory of colour in a discursive and performative analysis of a contemporary Trinidad Carnival mas or masquerade, The Dying Swan: Ras Nijinsky in Drag as Pavlova (2016). With this performance, a more inclusive national identity is envisioned through a queer world-making that challenges prevailing cultural norms and subvert traditional sexual identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the most distinctive maps of the seventeenth-century Caribbean is an unsigned 1670s manuscript map of English Montserrat. Unusual for its presentation of a series of seven perspectival views of the coastline, "Mountserrat Island 1673" captures a highly localized understanding of the island as a sequence of fragmented roadsteads with an unmapped and uncontrolled interior. Contrasting the Montserrat map with more conventional views of other British Caribbean islands reveals the divergent ways that colonists and metropolitan residents understood these colonies and the consequences for the construction of the British empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broadly, the African Diaspora includes anyone with roots in the African continent. The World Bank estimates that this is around 140 million people. This paper focuses on the diaspora in the English-speaking/Commonwealth Caribbean. It reviews existing research, both quantitative and qualitative, on culture and management, including recent results of the LEAD research. The paper provides a new and more complete understanding of the implications of culture for managers in these countries. The paper synthesizes the results from research projects to reach conclusions about practical implications for management. The paper also suggests avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and the passage of the Slave Emancipation Act in 1833, the British West India interest mounted a pervasive and influential campaign in defence of colonial slavery. This article gives the fullest account yet of the strength and activities of the West India interest during that decade of debate and argument. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the West Indians—far from a reactionary political rump—successfully created a broader pro-slavery lobby. First, the West Indians cultivated the support of numerous leading conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Quarterly Review, and Fraser's Magazine. Secondly, the West Indians courted the political favour of several leading Tories of the day, among them Canning, Huskisson, Peel and Wellington. Consequently, this article shows that pro-slavery sympathies were prevalent and influential with British print and political culture until 1833. It concludes that, for many Britons and especially British conservatives, colonial slavery—as much as the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Established Church—was an essential element of national life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how UK community radio can facilitate and produce alternative articulations of identity and experience, which, in turn, negotiate and challenge normative discursive framings of race which otherwise dominate UK mainstream media. In particular, this article examines ways in which The TalkBackShow on Nottingham community station Kemet FM produces articulations of British Caribbean identity and argues that community radio's remit of inclusivity enables transcultural production in the form of 'accented radio'. Accented modes of production are shaped in radio, by conditions of displacement and marginalization and responses to these experiences. An accented radio programme thus functions at the local level – speaking not only to the community whose members produce it but also to other local (and marginalized) communities – and simultaneously articulates a wider, transnational perspective. This article examines radio content from The TalkBackShow with reference to accented production practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the factors producing economic and political unrest in the underdeveloped, or "backward," areas of the world, a particularly potent force, according to the author of this article, is the effect of archaic and inefficient supervisory practices on the outlook of native workers toward society. Not only do these outmoded practices contribute to social unrest, but they also inhibit the expansion of output essential to raising the extremely low levels of living in these areas. Development of supervisory training programs in underdeveloped areas, through the technical assistance program and foreign subsidiaries of American firms, is urged as a needed device in fostering economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]