Does Decline Make Sense? The West Indian Economy and the Abolition of the British Slave Trade

2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Beck Ryden
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Data ◽  
Indian Economy ◽  
The Caribbean

Most historians describe the moral distaste for slavery as the sole reason for the cessation of the British slave trade. Data from the Caribbean, however, along with contemporary commentary, show that an economic crisis faced by sugar planters was critical to the timing of abolition in 1807.

HURRICANES, CROPS, AND CAPITAL: THE METEOROLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE WEST INDIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie L. Pietruska
Keyword(s):  
West Indian ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Empire ◽  
The West ◽  
Knowledge Infrastructure ◽  
Military Security ◽  
Symbolic Extension ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Weather Service

This article examines the mutually reinforcing imperatives of government science, capitalism, and American empire through a history of the U.S. Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service at the turn of the twentieth century. The original impetus for expanding American meteorological infrastructure into the Caribbean in 1898 was to protect naval vessels from hurricanes, but what began as a measure of military security became, within a year, an instrument of economic expansion that extracted climatological data and produced agricultural reports for American investors. This article argues that the West Indian weather service was a project of imperial meteorology that sought to impose a rational scientific and bureaucratic order on a region that American officials considered racially and culturally inferior, yet relied on the labor of local observers and Cuban meteorological experts in order to do so. Weather reporting networks are examined as a material and symbolic extension of American technoscientific power into the Caribbean and as a knowledge infrastructure that linked the production of agricultural commodities in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the world of commodity exchange in the United States.

Caribbean Commission

1952 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-136
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Virgin Islands ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

The thirteenth session of the Caribbean Commission was held in the Virgin Islands from October 29 to November 3,1951, with Ward M. Canaday (United States) presiding. Items on the agenda included the budget for 1952, consideration of special reports and recommendations, and preparation for the fifth session of the West Indian Conference scheduled to be held in Jamaica in 1952.

An English Library at Trinidad, 1633

1955 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
Caribbean Area ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
El Dorado ◽  
Short Time

The island of Trinidad was discovered by Columbus on the third voyage in 1498. One of the largest and most fertile of the West Indian islands, for many years it remained on the fringe of European activity in the Caribbean area and on the coasts of Venezuela and Guiana. A Spanish settlement was founded there in 1532, but apparently it disintegrated within a short time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Berrio and Raleigh fought for possession of the island, but chiefly as a convenient base for their rival search for El Dorado, or Manoa, the Golden Man and the mythical city of gold. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explorers, corsairs, and contraband traders, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, passed near its shores, and many of them may well have paused there to refresh themselves and to make necessary repairs to their vessels. But the records are scanty and we know little of such events or of the settlements that existed from time to time.

Caribbean Commission

1949 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-166
Keyword(s):  
Dominican Republic ◽  
United Nations ◽  
West Indies ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
French West Indies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The United Nations

The third session of the West Indian Conference opened at Guadeloupe, French West Indies on December 1, 1948 and closed on December 14, after considering policy to be followed by the Caribbean Commission for the next two years. The Conference was attended by two delegates from each of the fifteen territories within the jurisdiction of the commission and observers invited by the commission from Haiti, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the United Nations and its specialized agencies.

Fetishism and the Moral Marketplace: How Abolitionist Sugar Boycotts in the 1790s Defined British Consumers and the West Indian "Other"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Laurel Carmichael
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Direct Link ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
The West ◽  
The People

<p>In the early 1790s more than 300,000 Britons boycotted West Indian sugar in one of the most impressive displays of public mobilisation against the slave trade. Many of those who abstained were inspired by William Fox’s 1791 pamphlet An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum. The abstention movement gained momentum amidst the failures of the petition campaign to achieve a legislative end to the slave-trade, and placed the responsibility of ending slavery with all British consumers. This thesis draws from cross-disciplinary scholarship to argue that the campaign against slave sugar appealed to an idealised image of the humanitarian consumer and maligned slave. Writers such as Fox based their appeal on a sense of religious duty, class-consciousness and gendered values. Both the domestic sphere and the consumer body were transformed into sites of political activism, as abolitionists attempted to establish a direct link between the ingestion of sugar and the violence of colonial slavery. Attempts to encourage consumers’ sympathetic identification with the plight of distant slaves occurred alongside attempts to invoke horror and repulsion at slave suffering. The image of the West Indian slave presented to consumers was one shaped by fetishized European imaginings. The decision to abstain from slave sugar, therefore, was not only motivated by genuine philanthropic concerns, but the desire to protect the civilised and refined modern consumer, from the contaminating products of colonial barbarity.</p>

scholarly journals NÅR KULTUR SKAL „BEVARES" - perspektiver fra et vestindisk projekt

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Fog Olwig
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Fourth World ◽  
The West ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Indigenous Status ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Anthropological Theory ◽  
The Caribbean

Karen Fog Olwig: When culture is to be „preserved“: perspectives from a West Indian research project At the same time as anthropology has begun to apply a more processual perspective to the study of culture as fluid and changing, many of the „fourth world“ peoples studied by anthropologists have become preoccupied with codifying their culture in the form of aboriginal, authentic traditions which can be preserved from change. This concem with cultural traditions is tied to the struggle for human rights by indigenous people. The concept of culture as unchanged traditions is not only in conflict with current anthropological thinking, it is also ill suited to the struggles of peoples who cannot claim this form of ancient indigenous status, but who nevertheless share with „fourth world“ peoples the same need to defend their cultural autonomy. Among this latter group is the people of the Caribbean, who are indigenous to Africa, but came to the islands as part of a process of colonization. This article is based upon a study of the difficulties faced by such a non-indigenous, but nevertheless „native“ community of several centuries standing, in their efforts to defend their cultural and economic autonomy. In the West Indian case modem anthropological theory and the population studied by anthropologists need not be in conflict.

London Calypso

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Bidnall
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
Social Commentary ◽  
Indian Community ◽  
The Caribbean

“London Calypso” examines the burst of popular enthusiasm for Trinidadian calypso that coincided with the arrival of the first generation of postwar settlers to London from the Caribbean. To explain this phenomenon, Bidnall traces the calypso’s roots as a vehicle of unbridled social commentary and bawdy celebration. The reflections of calypsonians Lord Kitchener, Lord Beginner, Lord Invader and others, captured on records from labels like Melodisc and Parlophone, were therefore a unique barometer of the rewards and frustrations of postwar migration for the West Indian community. “London Is The Place For Me” may be the most celebrated of this oeuvre, but the legacy of the London calypsonians is rawer and more unbridled.

Some social and phenomenological characteristics of psychotic immigrants

1981 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roland Littlewood ◽  
Maurice Lipsedge
Keyword(s):  
Retrospective Study ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Married Women ◽  
West African ◽  
High Rate ◽  
Psychiatric Unit ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

SynopsisVarious studies have shown: (i) increased rates of psychoses in immigrants to Britain, and a particularly high rate of schizophrenia in the West Indian- and West African-born; and (ii) a greater proportion of atypical psychoses in immigrants. A retrospective study of psychotic inpatients from a London psychiatric unit demonstrated increased rates of schizophrenia in patients from the Caribbean and West Africa. These patients included a high proportion of those with paranoid and religious phenomenology, those with frequent changes of diagnosis, formal admissions, and married women. The West Indian-born had been in Britain for nearly 10 years before first seeing a psychiatrist and, if they had an illness with religious symptomatology, were likely to have been in hospital for only 3 weeks. Rates of schizophrenia without paranoid phenomenology were similar in each ethnic group. It is suggested that the increase in the diagnosis of schizophrenia in the West Indian- born, and possibly in the West African-born, may be due in part to the occurrence of acute psychotic reactions which are diagnosed as schizophrenia.

Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Political Connection ◽  
The West ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Comprehensive Plan ◽  
Important Addition ◽  
Personal Level

In the later eighteenth century the West Indian sugar islands were a source of conspicuous wealth for some individuals and an important addition to the resources of Great Britain. They were generally reckoned to be the most valuable of Britain’s imperial possessions, a view which Burke fully endorsed. This book examines his long involvement with the West Indies, at a personal level through the ambitions of his brother and some of his closest friends, as a politician and what contemporaries called ‘a man of business’ in the management of a great national asset and in trying to win the support of powerful West Indian interests for his political connection. He became a participant in debates about the ethics of enslavement and the slave trade. Burke deplored both slavery and the trade, but he recognized that the plantation economy of the West Indies depended on them and that therefore they played a crucial role in Britain’s immensely valuable Atlantic commerce. The policies that he advocated for the further development of the West Indian and African trades inevitably involved more enslaved Africans in the British Empire and on occasions he was drawn into implicitly endorsing the slave trade. Except for a few years from 1788 to 1791, Burke was not prepared to countenance immediate abolition of the trade, but he did devise a comprehensive plan for reforming both it and the institution of slavery, that in the very long term would make both redundant.

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