Author: Bonham C. Richardson Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807864080 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Unlike the earthquakes and hurricanes that have influenced Caribbean history, the region's fires have almost always been caused by humans. Geographer Bonham C. Richardson explores the effects of fire in the social and ecological history of the British Lesser Antilles, from the British Virgin Islands south to Trinidad. Focusing on the late nineteenth century, leading to the 1905 withdrawal of British military forces from the region, Richardson shows how fire-lit social upheavals served as forerunners of political independence movements. Drawing on Caribbean and London archives as well as years of fieldwork, Richardson examines how villagers used, modified, and contemplated fire in part to vent their frustrations with a savage economic depression and social and political inequities imposed from afar. He examines fire in all its forms, from protest torches to sugarcane fires that threatened the islands' economic staple. Richardson illuminates a neglected period in Caribbean history by showing how local uses of fire have been catalysts and even causes of important changes in the region.
Author: Georgia L. Fox Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 1683401441 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
This volume uses archaeological and documentary evidence to reconstruct daily life at Betty’s Hope plantation on the island of Antigua, one of the largest sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It demonstrates the rich information that the multidisciplinary approach of contemporary historical archaeology can offer when assessing the long-term impacts of sugarcane agriculture on the region and its people. Drawing on ten years of research at the 300-year-old site, the researchers uncover the plantation’s inner workings and its connections to broader historical developments in the Atlantic World. Excavations at the Great House reveal similarities to other British colonial sites, and historical records reveal the owners’ involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and in the trade of rum and other commodities. Artifacts uncovered from the slave quarters—ceramic tokens, repurposed bottle glass, and hundreds of Afro-Antiguan pottery sherds—speak to the agency of enslaved peoples in the face of harsh living conditions. Contributors also use ethnographic field data collected from interviews with contemporary farmers, as well as soil analysis to demonstrate how three centuries of sugarcane monocropping created a complicated legacy of soil depletion. Today tourism has long surpassed sugar as Antigua’s primary economic driver. Looking at visitor exhibits and new technologies for exploring and interpreting the site, the volume discusses best practices in cultural heritage management at Betty’s Hope and other locations that are home to contested historical narratives of a colonial past. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
Author: Matthew Mulcahy Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 0801898978 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
Hurricanes created unique challenges for the colonists in the British Greater Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These storms were entirely new to European settlers and quickly became the most feared part of their physical environment, destroying staple crops and provisions, leveling plantations and towns, disrupting shipping and trade, and resulting in major economic losses for planters and widespread privation for slaves. In this study, Matthew Mulcahy examines how colonists made sense of hurricanes, how they recovered from them, and the role of the storms in shaping the development of the region's colonial settlements. Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 provides a useful new perspective on several topics including colonial science, the plantation economy, slavery, and public and private charity. By integrating the West Indies into the larger story of British Atlantic colonization, Mulcahy's work contributes to early American history, Atlantic history, environmental history, and the growing field of disaster studies.
Author: Basil A Reid Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351169181 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 454
Book Description
Comprising 17 chapters and with a wide geographic reach stretching from the Florida Keys in the north to the Guianas in the south, this volume places a well-needed academic spotlight on what is generally considered an integral topic in Caribbean and circum-Caribbean archaeology. The book explores a variety of issues, including the introduction and dispersal of early cultivars, plant manipulation, animal domestication, dietary profiles, and landscape modifications. Tried-and-true and novel analytical techniques are used to tease out aspects of the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean database that inform the complex and often-subtle processes of domestication under varying socio-environmental conditions. Contributors discuss their findings within multiple constructs such as neolithisation, social interaction, trade, mobility, social complexity, migration, colonisation, and historical ecology. Multiple data sources are used which include but are not restricted to rock art, cooking pits and pots, stable isotopes, dental calculus and pathologies, starch grains, and proxies for past environmental conditions. Given its multi-disciplinary approaches, this volume should be of immense value to both researchers and students of Caribbean archaeology, biogeography, ethnobotany, zooarchaeology, historical ecology, agriculture, environmental studies, history, and other related fields.
Author: John F. Cherry Publisher: Oxbow Books ISBN: 1789253934 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 192
Book Description
Montserrat is a small island in the Leeward islands of the eastern Caribbean and at present a British Overseas Territory. It has suffered greatly in recent times, first from the devastations of Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and since 1995 from the still-ongoing eruption of the Soufrière Hills volcano that has caused two-thirds of the islands population to emigrate and left half the island a dangerous exclusion zone. Archaeological research here began only in the late 1970s, but work over the past four decades has now made it possible to present an archaeological history of Montserrat, from the earliest known traces of human activity on the island about 5,000 years ago to the present. This book draws on all the available archaeological evidence (including that from the co-authors own island-wide survey and excavation project since 2010), as well as newly available archival documents, to trace this little islands long history and heritage. This is not the story of an isolated and remote island: Montserrat is shown rather to be a place intricately connected to the flows of people and goods that have travelled between islands and across the Atlantic at various points in time, both Amerindian and historical. Despite its small size and seeming irrelevance, Montserrat has in fact always been networked into regional and global systems of connectivity. An underlying theme of this volume is resilience. It presents insights from the archaeological and documentary evidence on how the islands inhabitants have coped with often adverse conditions throughout the course of its history hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, slavery, disease, invasions, and impoverishment all while remaining proudly connected to heritage that celebrates the accomplishments of island residents.
Author: J. Besson Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230605044 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
The book is an interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays, with an editorial introduction, on a range of territories in the Commonwealth, Francophone, and Hispanic Caribbean. The authors focus on land and development, providing fresh perspectives through a collection of international contributing authors.
Author: Raymond A. Saraceni Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd ISBN: 1800461410 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Colourful and various – characterised by rich histories, a treasure-trove of fascinating places, and most especially by an array of unique, compelling personalities – the Caribbean islands are decidedly more than their beaches and resorts. Focused upon some of the region’s tiniest islands, this work offers the reader unique access to the stunning beauty, the bustling diversity, the compelling cultural life, of each of these frequently (and unfairly) overlooked places. From the cloud forests of Saba to the desolate ruins of St. Eustatius’ Lower Town, from Nevis’ sly monkeys to Montserrat’s goatskin bands, to Anguilla’s gleaming salt ponds, Off the Beach tells a tale of past and present: of slavers and slave resistance, of volcanic blasts, stalwart revolutionaries, and of tourism’s inescapable effects. Informed by the author’s many years of travel to the region, Off the Beach will also introduce the reader to a cadre of artists, and authors, scholars, entrepreneurs, and pioneers who call these islands home. Ideal for any travel enthusiast or history buff looking for a compelling read about culture and history in the place they intend to travel to.
Author: Christer Petley Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1315518635 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 154
Book Description
Material things mattered immensely to those who engaged in daily struggles over the character and future of slavery and to those who subsequently contested the meanings of freedom in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Throughout the history of slavery, objects and places were significant to different groups of people, from the opulent master class to enslaved field hands as well as to other groups, including maroons, free people of colour and missionaries, all of who shared the lived environments of Caribbean plantation colonies. By exploring the rich material world inhabited by these people, this book offers new ways of seeing history from below, of linking localised experiences with global transformations and connecting deeply personal lived realities with larger epochal events that defined the history of slavery and its abolition in the British Caribbean. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.
Author: Yvonne Daniel Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 0252036530 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
In Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship, Yvonne Daniel provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of diaspora dance genres. In discussing relationships among African, Caribbean, and other diasporic dances, Daniel investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum-dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas,rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk. Daniel reviews sacred dance and closely documents combat dances, such as Martinican ladja, Trinidadian kalinda, and Cuban juego de maní. In drawing on scores of performers and consultants from the region as well as on her own professional dance experience and acumen, Daniel adeptly places Caribbean dance in the context of cultural and economic globalization, connecting local practices to transnational and global processes and emphasizing the important role of dance in critical regional tourism.
Author: Bonham C. Richardson
Author: Georgia L. Fox
Author: Matthew Mulcahy
Author: Basil A Reid
Author: John F. Cherry
Author: J. Besson
Author: Raymond A. Saraceni
Author: Christer Petley
Author: Tim Watson
Author: Yvonne Daniel