Author: Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812293398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
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Book Description
There were 26—not 13—British colonies in America in 1776. Of these, the six colonies in the Caribbean—Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Grenada and Tobago, St. Vincent; and Dominica—were among the wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland by social ties and tightly connected by trade. In a period when most British colonists in North America lived less than 200 miles inland and the major cities were all situated along the coast, the ocean often acted as a highway between islands and mainland rather than a barrier. The plantation system of the islands was so similar to that of the southern mainland colonies that these regions had more in common with each other, some historians argue, than either had with New England. Political developments in all the colonies moved along parallel tracks, with elected assemblies in the Caribbean, like their mainland counterparts, seeking to increase their authority at the expense of colonial executives. Yet when revolution came, the majority of the white island colonists did not side with their compatriots on the mainland. A major contribution to the history of the American Revolution, An Empire Divided traces a split in the politics of the mainland and island colonies after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, when the colonists on the islands chose not to emulate the resistance of the patriots on the mainland. Once war came, it was increasingly unpopular in the British Caribbean; nonetheless, the white colonists cooperated with the British in defense of their islands. O'Shaughnessy decisively refutes the widespread belief that there was broad backing among the Caribbean colonists for the American Revolution and deftly reconstructs the history of how the island colonies followed an increasingly divergent course from the former colonies to the north.
Author: Eric Williams
Publisher: A & B Book Dist Incorporated
ISBN: 9781881316640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Author: Juanita De Barros
Publisher: Markus Wiener Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
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Book Description
In this book, leading scholars pull together some of the most recent research on the key themes of Caribbean history: slavery, the transition to freedom, colonialism, and decolonization. Although all parts of the Caribbean experienced these phases, the manner in which they did so differed significantly, in part because of their distinct imperial histories. Contemporary fragmentation and insularity have led to significant variations in the region's historiography. The contributors examine the divergent historiographical and methodological developments in the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean. By addressing these four linguistic areas of the Caribbean, they aim to overcome the traditional differences imposed by language and in the process to explore hotly debated subjects and new directions in Caribbean scholarship.
Author: Randy M. Browne
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812294270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive. Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death. Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.
Author: Bryan Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Agriculture
Languages : en
Pages : 544
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Book Description
Author: Eric Williams
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469619490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.
Author: Bermuda Islands
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bermuda Islands
Languages : en
Pages : 126
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Book Description
Author: Elsa V. Goveia
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214
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Book Description
Author: Natasha Lightfoot
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184
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Book Description
In 1834 Antigua became the only British colony in the Caribbean to move directly from slavery to full emancipation. Immediate freedom, however, did not live up to its promise, as it did not guarantee any level of stability or autonomy, and the implementation of new forms of coercion and control made it, in many ways, indistinguishable from slavery. In Troubling Freedom Natasha Lightfoot tells the story of how Antigua's newly freed black working people struggled to realize freedom in their everyday lives, prior to and in the decades following emancipation. She presents freedpeople's efforts to form an efficient workforce, acquire property, secure housing, worship, and build independent communities in response to elite prescriptions for acceptable behavior and oppression. Despite its continued efforts, Antigua's black population failed to convince whites that its members were worthy of full economic and political inclusion. By highlighting the diverse ways freedpeople defined and created freedom through quotidian acts of survival and occasional uprisings, Lightfoot complicates conceptions of freedom and the general narrative that landlessness was the primary constraint for newly emancipated slaves in the Caribbean.
Author: Barbara Lewis Solow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521533201
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360
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Book Description
The proceedings of a conference on Caribbean slavery and British capitalism are recorded in this volume. Convened in 1984, the conference considered the scholarship of Eric Williams & his legacy in this field of historical research.
