Freedom Roots

Author(s):  
Laurent Dubois ◽  
Richard Lee Turits

“To tell the history of the Caribbean is to tell the history of the world," write Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turits. In this powerful and expansive story of the vast archipelago, Dubois and Turits chronicle how the Caribbean has been at the heart of modern contests between slavery and freedom, racism and equality, and empire and independence. From the emergence of racial slavery and European colonialism in the early sixteenth century to U.S. annexations and military occupations in the twentieth, systems of exploitation and imperial control have haunted the region. Yet the Caribbean is also where empires have been overthrown, slavery was first defeated, and the most dramatic revolutions triumphed. Caribbean peoples have never stopped imagining and pursuing new forms of liberty. Dubois and Turits reveal how the region’s most vital transformations have been ignited in the conflicts over competing visions of land. While the powerful sought a Caribbean awash in plantations for the benefit of the few, countless others anchored their quest for freedom in small-farming and counter-plantation economies, at times succeeding against all odds. Caribbean realities to this day are rooted in this long and illuminating history of struggle.

1988 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 593-606
Author(s):  
John Villiers

The numerous and voluminous reports and letters which the Jesuits wrote on the Moro mission, as on all their missions in Asia, are perhaps of less interest to us now for what they reveal of the methods adopted by the Society of Jesus in this remote corner of their mission field or the details they contain about the successes and failures of individual missionaries, than for the wealth of information they provide on the islands where the Jesuits lived and the indigenous societies with which they came into contact through their work of evangelization. In other words, it is not theprimary purpose of this essay to analyse the Jesuit documents with a view to reconstructing the history of the Moro mission in narrative form but rather to glean from them some of the informationthey contain about the social and political conditions in Moro during the forty years or so in the sixteenth century when both the Jesuit missionaries and the Portuguese were active in the regio Because the Jesuits were often in close touch with local rulers and notables, whether or not they succeeded in converting them to Christianity, and because they lived among their subjects for long periods, depending upon them for the necessities of life and sharing their hardships, their letters and reports often show a deeper understanding of the social, economic and political conditions of the indigenous societies and, one suspects, give a more accurate and measured account of events and personalities than do the official chroniclers and historians of the time, most of whom never ventured further east than Malacca and who in any case were chiefly concerned to glorify the deeds of the Portuguese and justify their actions to the world.


Author(s):  
William Ghosh

V.S. Naipaul is one of the most internationally acclaimed twentieth-century writers from the Caribbean region. Yet it is usually assumed that he was neither much influenced by the Caribbean literary and intellectual tradition, nor very influential upon it. This chapter argues that these assumptions are wrong. It situates Naipaul’s life and work within the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth-century Caribbean. Naipaul’s work formed part of a larger historical debate about the sociology of slavery in the Caribbean, the specificity of Caribbean colonial experience, and the influence of that historical past on Caribbean life, culture, and politics after independence. The chapter closes with a reading of Naipaul’s late, retrospective book about Trinidad, A Way in the World.


2004 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 585-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Cox

It is an empire without a consciousness of itself as such, constantly shocked that its good intentions arouse resentment abroad. But that does not make it any the less of an empire, with a conviction that it alone, in Herman Melville's words, bears ‘the ark of liberties of the world.If all history according to Marx has been the history of class struggle, then all international history, it could just as well be argued, has been the struggle between different kinds of Empire vying for hegemony in a world where the only measure was success and the only means of achieving this was through war. Indeed, so obvious is this fact to historians – but so fixated has the profession of International Relations been with the Westphalian settlement – that it too readily forgets that imperial conquest, rather than mere state survival, has been the principle dynamic shaping the contours of the world system from the sixteenth century onwards. Empires, however, were not just mere agents existing in static structures. They were living entities that thought, planned, and then tried to draw the appropriate lessons from the study of what had happened to others in the past.


1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-76
Author(s):  
Edwin Jones

John Lingard (1771–1851) was the first English historian to attempt to look at the history of England in the sixteenth century from an international point of view. He was unconvinced by the story of the Reformation in England as found in the works of previous historians such as Burnet and Hume, and believed that new light needed to be thrown on the subject. One way of doing this was to look at English history from the outside, so to speak, and Lingard held it to be a duty of the historian ‘to contrast foreign with native authorities, to hold the balance between them with an equal hand, and, forgetting that he is an Englishman, to judge impartially as a citizen of the world’. In pursuit of this ideal Lingard can be said to have given a new dimension to the source materials for English history. As parish priest in the small village of Hornby, near Lancaster, Lingard had few opportunities for travel. But he made good use of his various friends and former pupils at Douai and Ushaw colleges who were settled now in various parts of Europe. It was with the help of these friends that Lingard made contacts with and gained valuable information from archives in France, Italy and Spain. We shall concern ourselves here only with the story of Lingard's contacts with the great Spanish State Archives at Simancas.


Author(s):  
Henk Ten Napel

In the centre of the City of London one can find the Dutch Church Austin Friars. Thanks to the Charter granted in 1550 by King Edward VI, the Dutch refugees were allowed to start their services in the church of the old monastery of the Augustine Friars. What makes the history of the Dutch Church in London so special is the fact that the church can lay claim to being the oldest institutionalised Dutch protestant church in the world. As such it was a source of inspiration for the protestant church in the Netherlands in its formative years during the sixteenth century. Despite its long history, the Dutch Church is still alive and well today. This article will look at the origin of this church and the challenges it faced and the developments it experienced during the 466 years of its existence.


Author(s):  
Tammi-Marie Phillip

This chapter presents an in-depth look at the potential for telemental health within the diverse region of Latin America and the Caribbean. A review of history of mental health and the current needs and limited available services in the Caribbean and Latin America will be provided. The chapter will use the example of, yet primitive, experience of implementing telemedicine or telehealth in the region to infer the potential utility of technological means in bridging the existing mental health gap. Although this mode of treatment has not been implemented yet, horizons for implementation of telemental health are open in this region, as it promises increased access to mental health treatment to those who need it the most. Future steps will have address cost-effectiveness and cultural acceptability unique to this part of the world.


Author(s):  
Anthony Pagden

Europe's incursion into the Atlantic — the ‘occidental break out’ — after the mid-fifteenth century created many challenges and generated many kinds of ‘newness’ for all of those caught up in it. For the peoples of the African littoral, of the Canary Islands, of the Caribbean, and of the American mainland, the contact with Europeans throughout this period was inevitably, if not always initially, violent. Both Africa and America had been the site of large political structures which the Europeans called ‘empires’, Zimbabwe and Benin, Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru, before the fifteenth century. The discovery of America had seriously undermined both classical geography and the traditional Christian accounts of the creation and subsequent peopling of the world. It offered, however, other, less direct, challenges to the ancient understanding of the world which in the end, were to be even more devastating for the subsequent history of Europe.


Author(s):  
Candice Goucher

This essay follows the iguana, an indigenous genus of herbivorous lizards, to the Caribbean dinner table, from the fifteenth century to the present. Inspired by historian Jerry Bentley’s scholarly contributions to questions of cultural encounters, the essay argues for the importance of indigenous foods in complex, often ambiguous, and consistently nuanced processes of cultural interactions between indigenous peoples and transplanted Europeans, Asians, and Africans. The story of how and why the iguana consistently appeared in the region’s foodways provides a critical perspective on the history of globalization in the Atlantic world. Mapping the variety of these culinary experiences can also reveal insights into the Caribbean’s changing ecology and the role of indigenous beliefs and African interpretations in the eco-cultural encounters that reshaped the flavors and choices of the region.


Author(s):  
Owen Stanwood

Huguenot refugees were everywhere in the early modern world. Exiles fleeing French persecution, they scattered around Europe and beyond following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, settling in North America, the Caribbean, South Africa, and even remote islands in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. This book offers the first global history of the Huguenot diaspora, explaining how and why these refugees became such ubiquitous characters in the history of imperialism. The story starts with dreams of Eden, as beleaguered religious migrants sought suitable retreats to build perfect societies far from the political storms of Europe. In order to create these communities, however, the Huguenots needed patrons, and they thus ran headlong into the world of politics. The refugees promoted themselves as the chosen people of empire, religious heroes who also possessed key skills that would strengthen the British and Dutch states. As a result, French Protestants settled around the world—they tried to make silk in South Carolina; they planted vines in South Africa; and they peopled vulnerable frontiers from New England to Suriname. Of course, this embrace of empire led to a gradual abandonment of the Huguenots’ earlier utopian ambitions. They realized that only by blending in, and by mastering foreign institutions, could they prosper in a quickly changing world. Nonetheless, they managed to maintain a key role in the early modern world well into the eighteenth century, before the coming of Revolution upended the ancien régime.


2020 ◽  
pp. 67-109
Author(s):  
Jerome Tharaud

This chapter traces how American abolitionists took up evangelical media strategies in the mid- and late 1830s, launching circulating antislavery libraries that adapted evangelical space to the geographies of slavery. It mentions that the American Anti-Slavery Society urged readers to extend their “ethical horizon” beyond the local. It also details how the Society used events in the Caribbean and elsewhere to refocus evangelical zeal from Asia to the U.S. South, which transformed the world missionary enterprise into a model for national reform in the process. The chapter shows how abolitionists adapted traditional sacred geographies to chart the global contours of modernity's cruelest and most insidious institution. It maps the cosmic contours of the abolitionist spatial imagination and intervenes in scholarly debates surrounding the history of abolitionism, religious reform movements, and American literary and cultural studies.


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