-History

This book explores Africa's involvement in the Atlantic world from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. It focuses especially on the causes and consequences of the slave trade, in Africa, in Europe, and in the New World. Prior to 1680, Africa's economic and military strength enabled African elites to determine how trade with Europe developed. Thornton examines the dynamics which made slaves so necessary to European colonizers. He explains why African slaves were placed in significant roles. Estate structure and demography affected the capacity of slaves to form a self-sustaining society and behave as cultural actors.

This book brings together authors from different institutions and perspectives and from researchers specialising in different aspects of the experiences of the African Diaspora from Latin America. It creates an overview of the complexities of the lives of Black people over various periods of history, as they struggled to build lives away from Africa in societies that, in general, denied them the basic right of fully belonging, such as the right of fully belonging in the countries where, by choice or force of circumstance, they lived. Another Black Like Me thus presents a few notable scenes from the long history of Blacks in Latin America: as runaway slaves seen through the official documentation denouncing as illegal those who resisted captivity; through the memoirs of a slave who still dreamt of his homeland; reflections on the status of Black women; demands for citizenship and kinship by Black immigrants; the fantasies of Blacks in the United States about the lives of Blacks in Brazil; a case study of some of those who returned to Africa and had to build a new identity based on their experiences as slaves; and the abstract representations of race and color in the Caribbean. All of these provide the reader with a glimpse of complex phenomena that, though they cannot be generalized in a single definition of blackness in Latin America, share the common element of living in societies where the definition of blackness was flexible, there were no laws of racial segregation, and where the culture on one hand tolerates miscegenation, and on the other denies full recognition of rights to Blacks.

First published in English in 1968, Frantz Fanon's seminal text was immediately acclaimed as a classic of black liberationalist writing. Fanon's descriptions of the feelings of inadequacy and dependence experienced by people of colour in a white world are as salient and as compelling as ever. Fanon identifies a devastating pathology at the heart of Western culture, a denial of difference, that persists to this day. His writings speak to all who continue the struggle for political and cultural liberation in our troubled times.

"Recovered from the archives is Cyrus Francis Perkins' novel entitled Busha's Mistress or Catherine the Fugitive: A Stirring Romance of the Days of Slavery in Jamaica which was written in the mid-1800s and published in Jamaica in 1911 as a series of instalments in the local newspapers, the Daily Telegraph and the Jamaica Guardian. Cyrus Francis Perkins, a white Jamaican (of Canadian descent), lived through the period of Jamaica's history during which the colony was undergoing the transition from slavery to emancipation. The resulting story is, thus, rich in historically insightful details which bring that era to life and which make the book a valuable resource for scholars of Caribbean history. Revealed here are interesting tit-bits about the relationship between slave and master, the daily life on the sugar plantations, the business transactions involved, the depiction of the culture of the African slaves, the Maroon resistance and varied perspectives on the abolition of slavery. "

This reader of nearly 60 articles covers major events in the Caribbean struggle for freedom from emancipation to the present - from Toussaint's Haiti to the more recent revolutions in Cuba, Grenada and the Dominican Republic. The range of coverage is comprehensive calling attention to the variety of post-slavery experiences in the Spanish, Dutch, English and French Caribbean. Three broad themes are identified: the slow disintegration of the slave system which was not completed until 1886; the attempts by resistant social groups and imperial agencies to accept and adjust to freedom; and the maturing of nationalist consciousness in terms of constitutional and cultural independence. Among the areas covered under these themes are popular revolts and aborted revolutions; the sugar industry and economic diversification; peasants and planters; immigration from Europe, India and China; the role of women; labour movements; independence and nationhood."

The remaking of colonial Barbados as a postmodern nation state has its political roots buried deep within the past. In Chattel House Blues, Hilary Beckles sets out to rewrite modern Barbadian history by centring the evolution of the nation in centuries of grassroots struggle. Democracy in Barbados, he argues, as a social, political and cultural reality, has its origins principally within working class demands for freedom, justice and equality and not as a bestowal upon the masses by elites at moments of imperial and colonial enlightenment. In the second volume of his trilogy, Great House Rules: Landless Emancipation and Workers' Protest in Barbados 1838-1938, Prof. Beckles convincingly shows that for the first one hundred years after emancipation, an unbroken chain of resistance, protest and agitation for democratic governance, resulted in a decisive breach in the walls of the structures of white supremacy culminating in the Clement Payne Movement and the Riots of 1937. Black workers and their middle class allies secured Universal Adult Suffrage in 1950 and finally politically independence in 1966, ending the 'Great House Rule' that had begun three hundred years earlier. This process he further argues, reached maturity in 1994 when Owen Arthur, a young man from the chattel house in the plantation tenantry became prime minister. Independence and nationhood, though critical markers in the journey towards social justice and equity d not mean an end to the struggle. The politically enfranchised workers have since risen to an appreciation of their economic rights and the issue of popular economic democracy is now seen as the next step I civil rights development that Barbadians must confront. Chattel House Blues connects current political thinking with the historical process. In producing this work of historical literature that emphasises a people-centred culture of change and transformation, Prof. Beckles' thesis is challenging if not controversial and is bound to result in widespread debate among Barbadians at home and in the diaspora.

The 1820s and 1830s were a crucial period in the historical experience of the British Caribbean colonies, because it marked the adoption of a policy of slaveemancipation by the British government. Central to the implementation of that policy was the formal embrace of the enslaved Africans by the state church, the Anglican Church. This was made clear in the official pronouncement that religious instruction is the surest foundation for the amelioration of the state of the slave population.

Facing the Challenge of Emancipation shows, in clear and concise fashion, how William Hart Coleridge, the first Anglican bishop of Barbados and the Leewards, executed new mandate of the Anglican Church. Between 1824 and 1842, this inexperienced theologian displayed immense energy and skill in establishing his control over the diocese, in neutralizing the entrenched opposition to reform, and in raising financial support for a phenomenal building programme.

The result was that the Anglican Church for the first time became fully accessible to the enslaved and to their successors, the so-called apprentices and the newly freed persons. Particularly important was the provision of the rudiments of education, both religious and secular, to an increasing number of converts and their children through the agency of newly constructed chapels of ease and chapel schools. Goodridge demonstrates that, by the time that Bishop Coleridge retired to England, a flood of beneficial light had been cast on a dark period and that the Anglican Church in Barbados could be said to possess a popular dimension.

Written by two of the Caribbean's leading historians, Freedoms Won is an essential book for students engaged in following courses on the history of the Caribbean. It will also be of interest to general readers seeking information on the history of the region. Starting with the aftermath of emancipation, Freedoms Won covers the African-Caribbean peasantry, Asian arrival in the Caribbean, social and political experiences of the working classes in the immediate post-slavery period, the Caribbean economy, US intervention and imperialst tendencies from the 18th century, the Labour Movement in the Caribbean in the 20th centurym the social life and culture of the Caribbean people, and social protest, decolonisation and nationhood.

"The modern Caribbean
economy was invented, structured and managed by European states for one
purpose: to achieve maximum wealth extraction to fuel and sustain their
national financial, commercial and industrial transformation." So begins How Britain Underdeveloped the Caribbean: A
Reparation Response to Europe's Legacy of Plunder and Poverty as Hilary
McD. Beckles continues the groundbreaking work he began in Britain's Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native
Genocide.

We are now in
a time of global reckoning for centuries of crimes against humanity perpetrated
by European colonial powers as they built their empires with the wealth
extracted from the territories they occupied and exploited with enslaved and,
later, indentured labour. The systematic brutality of the transatlantic trade
in enslaved Africans and the plantation economies did not disappear with the
abolition of slavery. Rather, the means of exploitation were reconfigured to
ensure that wealth continued to flow to European states.

Independence
from colonial powers in the twentieth century did not mean real freedom for the
Caribbean nations, left as they were without the resources for meaningful
development and in a state of persistent poverty. Beckles focuses his attention
on the British Empire and shows how successive governments have systematically
suppressed economic development in their former colonies and have refused to accept
responsibility for the debt and development support they owe the Caribbean.