Plantation Coffee in Jamaica, 1790?1848 is the first comprehensive history of the Jamaican coffee industry, covering a period of rapid expansion and decline. The primary objective is to examine the structure and performance of the industry and to demonstrate the extent to which it contributed to the diversity of the Jamaican economy and society in this period. All of this is examined within the context of a period characterized by significant structural shifts in the then emerging global economy. As a work in economic history, the book is based on solid archival research and econometric analysis. Kathleen E.A. Monteith examines the changing levels of production, trade, productivity, and profitability of the industry and discusses the people involved in the industry, both free and enslaved. A demographic profile of the coffee planters and their familial relationships is established. The work experience of the enslaved men, women and children in the coffee industry, their organization, the nature of their works and their resistance to enslavement are also discussed. The clash of interests between the former enslaved people and coffee planters with respect to labour availability in the industry in the immediate post-slavery period are discussed also. Throughout the book, wherever possible, comparisons are made with other sectors of the Jamaican economy, especially with the sugar industry. Differences are explained in terms of environment, scale and the nature of production. Plantation Coffee in Jamaica, 1790?1848 contributes fresh material and interrogates data in systematic ways not previously undertaken by scholars in this area. Strikingly original are the sections dealing with the backgrounds of the coffee planters, drawing on sources only recently available for exploitation, notably the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database, family history and genealogical websites, and the sections dealing with profitability. This book compares well with other works in Caribbean history published at this level of scholarship. It has no immediate rivals in its specific field.
"The Rebel Woman describes a period in Jamaica's history where women played an important part in different forms of protest against slavery. Mair's book details both the negative and positive methods of protest used by the enslaved people of the West Indies. An excellent reference for students researching topics relating to slavery, freedom and gender.
This book highlights the variety of research conducted on the island's prehistoric site and artifacts. The text is a compilation of thirteen articles, five of which had been previously published but not widely available. The remaining eight new articles are based on archaeological research within the last five years. The book will appeal to a wide audience of archaeologists, historians, students of archaeology and anyone interested in Jamaica's history
Thomas Thistlewood (1721-1786) was a British estate overseer and small landowner in western Jamaica. He arrived in Jamaica, the most important of the British sugar colonies in 1750, when he was 29 years old. He became the overseer or manager of the Egypt sugar plantation near the small port of Savanna la Mar. He stayed in Jamaica until his death in 1786. He wrote a diary, which eventually ran to some 10,000 pages, and this diary became an important historical document on slavery and history of Jamaica.
The historic Hope lands located on the Liguanea Plain in the southeastern parish of St Andrew, Jamaica, and once the site of one of the island's earliest sugar estates, has had a long history of human settlements dating back to approximately 600 CE, the era of the indigenous Tainos. It was not until 1655, however, with the English invasion and seizure of Jamaica from the Spanish, that the Hope landscape developed into a thriving rural agrarian settlement. Generous land grants were made to the invading officers and later to immigrants from Britain and North America and from other Caribbean islands. Major Richard Hope came in possession of over 2,600 acres in the Liguanea Plain. Major Hope, unlike many of his counterparts by the 1660s, managed to establish a small sugar plantation, which developed by the mid-1700s into one of the island's largest, most productive and technologically advanced slave sugar estates. In the 1770s the estate became the property of the Duke of Chandos and his family until 1848, when the estate was dismantled. Over 600 acres were sold to the Kingston and Liguanea Water Works Company and the remaining 1,700 acres were leased to the owner of the adjoining Papine and Mona estates. Poor accounting and border surveillance enabled several persons to possess the land, which was later sanctioned by the Limitations of Actions Law. With the government's acquisition of the entire property in 1909, the Hope estate underwent remarkable changes in the twentieth century. By 1960 the Hope landscape was radically transformed from a sugar estate worked by hundreds of enslaved black people to a premiere urban centre of commercial, residential and educational land use.
Following the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean, a concerted effort was made to replace enslaved labour with indentured Indian labour. This is the story of one Indian woman's tragic experience in trying to immigrate to the Caribbean in the 19th century.
The study of business history as a distinct discipline is well established in many places but relatively neglected in the anglophone Caribbean. West Indian Business History: Essays in Enterprise and Entrepreneurship locates the regional history of business within the scope of Caribbean/Atlantic world economic history, placing it within the broader context of business history. As well as providing the foundation text for courses in West Indian business history, this volume is valuable to students of other areas of Caribbean history, wherever they may be enrolled, and also to Caribbean business studies students. The essays included in this collection bring together a selection of work in West Indian business history, some of them first published several decades ago. The essays are intended to provide an introduction to the state of the field and illustrate the ways in which business history connects with other themes in Caribbean history. They offer examples of the varieties of ways in which business history can be researched and written, and of the range of subjects that can be studied.