The Extended Foundation of the Caribbean Court of Justice between Decolonisation and Globalisation

This chapter deals with the extended process of creation of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) arguing that, different from what often stated in the literature, the Court is the institutional crystallisation of two long-enduring movements within the Caribbean legal field. One of these two movements is linked to the development of early regionalism, and ties into the Court’s origins as a regional economic institution aimed at reviving the Caribbean Common Market (CARICOM). The other is a movement related to the long-lasting process of Caribbean decolonisation from the United Kingdom, as the CCJ is also intended to be a regional Supreme Court to replace the Privy Council as the apex court of the former British West Indian colonies. The chapter also analyses the window of opportunity leading to the creation of the Court, most notably the clash between different generations of Caribbean legal elites and their own respective disagreements with the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on death penalty issues and, more generally, on how to handle the judicial system of the Caribbean countries.

“No Surrender”

British West Indian migrants spread Garveyism across the circum-Caribbean in the late 1910s and early 1920s. Indeed, the organization was particularly important for those women and men who found themselves on the move. A core tenant and achievement of the United Negro Improvement Association was its portability and reliability. While spreading a powerful message of black racial uplift, Garveyites built an association that afforded members concrete benefits measurable in their day-to-day lives. Garveyism offered a degree of social capital for migrant laborers, as well as communities and networks that eased the impact of their move. This chapter examines the mechanics of this process in Cuba.

Husbands and Fathers

We know relatively little about enslaved men, especially African-born men in British West Indian slave societies, in their roles as fathers and husbands within slave households. A generation of scholarship on gender in slave societies has tended to neglect enslaved men, thus allowing old understandings of enslaved men as not very involved with families drawn from biased planter sources to continue to shape scholarship. This article instead draws on a rich set of records (both quantitative and qualitative) from Berbice in British Guiana between 1819 and 1834 to explore enslaved men’s roles within informal marriages and as husbands and parents. We show not only that enslaved men were active participants in shaping family life within British West Indian slave societies but that they were aided and abetted in achieving some of their familial objectives by a sympathetic plantation regime in which white men favored enslaved men within enslaved households.