Comment

1959 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elsa V. Goveia

The West Indian area is one of the most attractive fields for comparative study. For, as Dr. Mintz has pointed out, it includes territories, generally similar in physical environment, which, nevertheless, differ in their individual histories. The marked divergence in the histories of Puerto Rico and Jamaica during the first half of the nineteenth century is only one instance among many which can be cited as worthy of attention. The interest of this particular case is that it raises the point in an acute form.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 178-184
Author(s):  
Petal Samuel

This review essay explores the extent to which the phenomenon of imperial “neglect” proposed in Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) maintains saliency in the wake of national independence throughout the British Caribbean. Through a reading of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, the essay highlights how the market logics of mid-nineteenth-century imperial liberalization continued to animate new forms of West Indian erasure well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While Kincaid deploys arguments of imperial neglect, she refuses the aspirations for repair that neglect implies. By stressing the impossibility of repairing the violence of British colonial rule, her work instead asks, What new forms of thought become possible beyond argumentative frames of repair?


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-102
Author(s):  
Jossianna Arroyo

This response essay reviews the six contributions to the special section “Con-Federating the Archipelago: The Confederación Antillana and the West Indies Federation.” These key interventions on the Spanish Caribbean Confederation projects in the nineteenth century and the West Indies Federation in the twentieth century provoke the following questions: Could we call these two Caribbean confederation projects failures if their centrality in Caribbean political imaginaries suggests otherwise? What are some of the insights that these two projects could offer to Caribbean sociohistorical processes, culture, and political developments? Even though these two projects seem to share a similar political goal, they are also radically different. The author reviews the contributions to the special section in dialogue with examples from Puerto Rico in order to assess the critical intervention in theories of nationalism produced by the past projects of federation and the possible futures they give rise to.


1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-204 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. R. Knight

Java's long-established sugar industry was transformed almost beyond recognition during the course of the nineteenth century. Under Dutch East India Company rule, which effectively lasted until the arrival on the island of Governor-General Daendels in 1808, sugar production had been organized almost exclusively by Chinese entrepreneurs, whose dozens of small sugar factories and plantations were scattered across the lowlands around Batavia (present day Jakarta). Their output played a subsidiary role in the prevailing pattern of colonial exploitation, was unable to compete in Europe with the production of West Indian sugar colonies and consequently found a sale, for the most part, only in other ‘protected’ Asian markets. During the nineteenth century, all this changed. First under government auspices—the so-called Cultivation System—and later under the direction of metropolitan-owned Sugar Corporations, the industry was transformed into a paradigm of colonial economic ‘development’. It was efficient, immensely profitable and productive (vast quantities of sugar were exported to the West), heavily capitalized and equipped with the best and most up-to-date machinery.


1957 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 548-548

The Caribbean Commission held its 23d meeting in Bridgetown, Barbados, December 10 to 15, 1956, under the chairmanship of H. R. Van Houten (Netherlands). In regard to conferences sponsored by the Commission, it 1) discussed a recommendation of the Town and Country Development Planning Conference held in Trinidad in November 1956 asking the Commission to arrange study tours in Puerto Rico where the activities of the Puerto Rico Planning Board could be observed, and suggesting that arrangements should be made for training of planning technicians and assistants; 2) approved the agenda of the Conference on the Demographic Problems of the area served by the Caribbean Commission, which would be held in August 1957 to discuss the present demographic position, projections, possible solutions of problems of over-population, and need for future research; and 3) decided to hold the West Indian Conference in Curacao, in November–December 1957.


Zootaxa ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 1994 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
AUBREY G. SCARBROUGH ◽  
DANIEL E. PEREZ-GELABERT

The species of Efferia from Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles are reviewed. Twenty species are recognized including 12 new species from the Dominican Republic: E. alia sp. nov., E. angusta sp. nov., E. bullata sp. nov., E. clava sp. nov., E. exacta sp. nov., E. incisura sp. nov., E. picea sp. nov., E. serrula sp. nov., E. sinuosa sp. nov., E. suspiciosa sp. nov., E. spinula sp. nov., and E. woodleyi sp. nov., and 1 from Puerto Rico: E. montensis sp. nov. Seven previously described West Indian species are recognized: E. forbesi (Curran, 1931), E. fortis (Walker, 1855), E. fulvibarbis (Macquart, 1848), E. haitensis (Macquart, 1848), E. nigrimystacea (Macquart, 1847), E. portoricensis (Curran, 1919), and E. stylata (Fabricius, 1775). An unresolved species from Tobago and Trinidad is also reported. All of these belong to the aestuans species group. New synonyms include: E. pachychaetus (Bromley, 1928) = E. fulvibarbis (Macquart, 1848), syn. nov.; E. tortola (Curran, 1928) = E. stylata (Fabricius, 1775), syn. nov.; and Phoneus flavotibius Bigot, 1878, = E. fortis (Walker, 1855), syn. nov. Efferia haitensis (Macquart, 1848) is removed from synonymy with E. stylata (Fabricius, 1775). The male of E. stylata is discovered and described. Lectotypes are designated for E. haitensis and E. nigrimystacea. The species is removed from the list of species from Hispaniola. Endemism is high with most species limited to single islands. Only E. stylata and E. forbesi occurring in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and E. nigrimystacea in the Lesser Antilles are more widespread. Hispaniola has the greatest diversity with 15 species whereas Puerto Rico, the British and US Virgin Islands, and the Lesser Antilles have 5. Keys, illustrations of the left wing of selected males, and terminalia of all known species are included. A check-list of the West Indian species of Efferia, including an unresolved species from Tobago and Trinidad, is also provided.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document