The Shaping of Folklore Traditions in the British West Indies

1967 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 456-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Abrahams
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New World ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Caribbean Islands ◽  
Modifying Factors ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Field Workers

Most of the countries in the New World were created by economically motivated European colonizers who invaded this hemisphere and defeated the resident populations. The dominant cultural life of these areas is based on the institutions, values and expressions carried by these seekers after empire, as modified by conditions and cultures encountered in the new lands. This is as true of the West Indies as it is of the various larger regions of the two Americas, but the modifying factors are more numerous in these small Caribbean islands. Rarely is there just one European tradition affecting the culture of each of these islands; as European possessions during this era of large-scale wars in Europe, most of them changed hands repeatedly. More important, the establishment of the plantation system and the resultant waves of imported field workers from alien, non-European societies created a cultural conglomerate of incredible variety.

scholarly journals Looking for Agency in Transnational Refugee Trajectories during the Second World War - Eric T. Jennings. Escape from Vichy: The Refugee Exodus to the French Caribbean. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. 308 pages. ISBN: 9780674983380, $36. - Megan Koreman. The Escape Line: How the Ordinary Heroes of Dutch-Paris Resisted the Nazi Occupation of Western Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 410 pages. 9780190662271, $29,95. - Joanna Newman. Nearly the New World: The British West Indies and the Flight from Nazism, 1933–1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2019. 306 pages. 9781789206494, $29,95.

Itinerario ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 174-187
Author(s):  
Rosa de Jong
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
New World ◽  
French Caribbean ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
The Government ◽  
Flight Route

AbstractThe authors of three recent monographs, The Escape Line, Escape from Vichy, and Nearly the New World, highlight in particular the relevance of transnational refugee and resistance networks. These books shed new light on the trajectories of refugees through war-torn Europe and their routes out of it. Megan Koreman displays in The Escape Line the relevance of researching one line of resistance functioning in several countries and thereby shifts from the common nationalistic approach in resistance research. In Escape from Vichy Eric Jennings researches the government-endorsed flight route between Marseille and Martinique and explores the lasting impact of encounters between refugees and Caribbean Negritude thinkers. Joanna Newman explores the mainly Jewish refugees who found shelter in the British West Indies, with a focus on the role of aid organisations in this flight.

Slavery and Christianity in the British West Indies

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 171-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Worthington Smith
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
The Caribbean

Slavery in the British Empire was always centered in the British West Indies. To a greater degree than in the Southern Thirteen Colonies, economic life in the West Indies depended upon Negro slavery, and the population of the islands soon became predominantly Negro. With the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after 1775, slavery within the British Empire became almost entirely confined to the Caribbean colonies. Until the emancipation of the slaves in 1833, British eyes were focused upon the West Indies whenever slavery was mentioned.

The milliped family Platyrhacidae (Polydesmida: Leptodesmidea) in the West Indies: Proposal of Hoffmanorhacus n. gen.; description and illustrations of males of Proaspis aitia Loomis, 1941; redescription of Nannorrhacus luciae (Pocock, 1894); hypotheses on origins and affinities; and an updated New World familial distribution

Zootaxa ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3626 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROWLAND M. SHELLEY ◽  
DANIELA MARTINEZ-TORRES
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
The West ◽  
Insular Populations

In the New World, the milliped family Platyrhacidae (Polydesmida) is known or projected for Central Americasouth of southeastern Nicaraguaand the northern ¼ of South America, with disjunct, insular populations on Hispaniola(Haiti), Guadeloupe(Basse-Terre), and St. Lucia. Male near-topotypes enable redescription of Proaspis aitia Loomis, 1941, possibly endemic to the western end of the southern Haitian peninsula. The tibiotarsus of its biramous gonopodal telopodite bends strongly laterad, and the medially directed solenomere arises at midlength proximal to the bend. With a uniramous telopodite, P. sahlii Jeekel, 1980, on Guadeloupe, is not congeneric, and Hoffmanorhacus, n. gen., is erected to accommodate it. Nannorrhacus luciae (Pocock, 1894), onSt. Lucia, is redescribed; also with a biramous telopodite, its tibiotarsus arises distad and diverges from the coaxial solenomere. The Antillean species do not comprise a clade and are only distantly related; rather than introductions, they plausibly reflect ancestral occurrences on the “proto-Antillean” terrain before it rifted from “proto-SouthAmerica” in the Cretaceous/Paleocene, with fragmentation isolating modern forms on their present islands. Existing platyrhacid tribes are formally elevated to subfamilies as this category was omitted from recent taxonomies. Without unequivocal evidence to the contrary, geographically anomalous species should initially be regarded as indigenous rather than anthropochoric.

Chronique d’une écologie décoloniale dans C’est ma terre de Fabrice Bouckat

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 189-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Françoise Naudillon
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Ecological Crisis ◽  
Agent Orange ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
The West ◽  
The One

The documentary film C’est ma terre by Fabrice Bouckat screened during the 2019 edition of Terrafestival is one of the first large-scale films produced locally on the crisis of the chlordecone molecule. This article will examine from a decolonial perspective, how its director, a Martinican with Gabonese origins who lives and works in Guadeloupe, develops a synthetic and universal vision of environmental crises, and thus demonstrates that destruction of ecosystems crosses time and space, cultures and lands, languages and peoples by bringing ecological crisis in the West Indies closer to the one experienced by the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

Description of the pupa and redescription of the third instar of Phileurus valgus (Olivier) (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Dynastinae: Phileurini)

Zootaxa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 4290 (3) ◽  
pp. 571
Author(s):  
MARIO G. IBARRA-POLESEL ◽  
NESTOR G. VALLE ◽  
JHON C. NEITA-MORENO ◽  
MIRYAM P. DAMBORSKY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Life Cycle ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
Common Species ◽  
Southern United States ◽  
Immature Stages ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Stage

Phileurus valgus (Olivier) (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Dynastinae: Phileurini) is a common species widely distributed from the southern United States to Argentina and the West Indies. In this work the immature stages are described and illustrated based on specimens from Argentina. A key to the known third-stage larvae of New World Phileurini species is provided and updated. Notes on the life cycle and natural history are also included. 

The Making of the Free Ports Act

2019 ◽  
pp. 105-124
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
British Atlantic ◽  
British North America ◽  
American Colonies ◽  
The North ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Crucial Component ◽  
British System

Burke became involved with West Indian issues at the very beginning of his political career. The brief Rockingham administration of 1765–6 was committed to measures to improve flows of trade around the British Atlantic, of which the West Indies was a crucial component. As the prime minister’s secretary, Burke was deeply involved in these measures. The main problem which they sought to remedy was the inability of the British West Indies to produce commodities needed in other parts of the Atlantic in sufficient quantities. These commodities were principally sugar and raw cotton for Britain and molasses for British North America. The remedy chosen was to allow foreign supplies of these commodities to enter the British system through what were called free ports in two British islands—Dominica and Jamaica. Burke was particularly influential in the provisions of the act relating to Dominica, whose ports were intended to draw in produce, especially raw cotton, from French islands that the British had occupied during the war. In return, they would export British manufactures and slaves to foreign colonies. Getting the act through Parliament required the careful balancing of interests, notably those of the North American colonies and of the West Indies. Burke was in the thick of these negotiations, forming many contacts with merchants. The act, by letting in foreign produce to British islands, marked a significant breach in the hitherto sacrosanct doctrine of imperial self-sufficiency.

scholarly journals Historical Biogeography of the New World Solitaires (Myadestes SPP)

The Auk ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 124 (3) ◽  
pp. 868-885 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Miller ◽  
Eldredge Bermingham ◽  
Robert E. Ricklefs
Keyword(s):  
Range Expansion ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
West Indian ◽  
Historical Biogeography ◽  
Greater Antilles ◽  
Long Distance Dispersal ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
The West ◽  
Sister Relationship

Abstract Solitaires (Myadestes spp.) are montane-forest birds that are widely distributed throughout the New World, ranging from Alaska to northern Bolivia and including both Hawaii and the West Indies. To understand the origins of this impressive distribution, we used five mitochondrial gene sequences to reconstruct the historical biogeography of the genus. The resulting phylogeny indicates a rapid initial spread of the genus to occupy most of its contemporary continental range at least as far south as lower Mesoamerica, plus Hawaii and the Greater Antilles. The North American M. townsendi appears to be the sister taxon of the rest of Myadestes. Myadestes obscurus of Hawaii is more closely allied to Mesoamerican lineages than to M. townsendi. The strongly supported sister relationship of the two West Indian taxa, M. elisabeth and M. genibarbis, indicates a single colonization of the West Indies. A more recent node links the Andean M. ralloides to the Mesoamerican M. melanops and M. coloratus. A standard molecular clock calibration of 2% sequence divergence per million years for avian mitochondrial DNA suggests that the initial diversification of Myadestes occurred near the end of the Miocene (between 5 and 7.5 mya). Cooler temperatures and lower sea levels at that time would have increased the extent of montane forests and reduced overwater dispersal distances, possibly favoring range expansion and colonization of the West Indies. The split between South American and southern Mesoamerican lineages dates to ∼3 mya, which suggests that Myadestes expanded its range to South America soon after the Pliocene rise of the Isthmus of Panama. Despite the demonstrated capacity of Myadestes for long-distance dispersal, several species of Myadestes are highly differentiated geographically. Phylogeographic structure was greatest in the West Indian M. genibarbis, which occurs on several islands in the Greater Antilles and Lesser Antilles, and in the Andean M. ralloides. The phylogeographic differentiation within M. ralloides was not anticipated by previous taxonomic treatments and provides a further example of the importance of the Andes in the diversification of Neotropical birds. Overall, the historical biogeography of Myadestes suggests that range expansion and long-distance dispersal are transient population phases followed by persistent phases of population differentiation and limited dispersal. Biogeografía Histórica de los Zorzales del Género Myadestes

The Problem of Liberal Empire Reconsidered

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
West Indies ◽  
The Political ◽  
British West Indies ◽  
The West ◽  
Economic Violence ◽  
Liberal Political Economy ◽  
Liberal Imperialism

This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to examine its practical effects in the colonies. In this turn, he provides an important and missing “materialization” of liberal empire that makes the deep connections between free trade and freeing slaves legible. The practical and theoretical coincidence of these nineteenth-century developments as well as Taylor’s reconstruction of a West Indian tradition of political economy provide a new way of conceptualizing colonial economic violence elaborated as the product of a neglectful empire. It is in this tradition of critiquing and resisting a neglectful empire that we find critical and normative resources to think beyond the terms of our own entrapments within the terms of liberal political economy.

Bryan Edwards, F.R.S., 1743-1800

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-222
Author(s):  
Olwyn M. Blouet
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
West Indian ◽  
The West ◽  
History Of ◽  
World Environment ◽  
Member Of Parliament

Bryan Edwards was a Jamaican planter and politician who published a well–respected History of the West Indies in 1793. He articulated the planter view concerning the value of the West Indian colonies to Great Britain, and opposed the abolition of the slave trade. Edwards disputed European scientific speculation that the ‘New World’ environment retarded nature, although his scientific interests have largely gone unnoticed. Elected a Fellow of The Royal Society in 1794, he became a Member of Parliament in 1796, and wrote a History of Haiti in the following year. As Secretary of the African Association, Edwards edited the African travel journals of Mungo Park.

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