First published in 1976 (see HLAS 40:2983), work is a masterful analysis of the dynamics of slave labor in the economic growth of early-19th-century Jamaica. Discusses various characteristics of slave and free-colored population including mortality, birth rates, manumission, distribution, and structure, as well as jobs performed on island as a whole. Contains excellent statistical tables and new introduction by author. -Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58
Reprint of work that originally appeared in 1984. Excellent and thorough treatment of major demographic aspects of British Caribbean slavery from abolition of slave trade to slave emancipation. Draws heavily on extensive data available from slave registration returns for various islands to provide comparative perspective of nature of slave life. Excellent tables and figures. Essential for serious scholars of the region. -Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58
Though centered on a single Jamaican sugar estate, Worthy Park, and dealing largely with the period of formal slavery, this book is firmly placed in far wider contexts of place and time. The "Invisible Man" of the title is found, in the end, to be not just the formal slave but the ordinary black worker throughout the history of the plantation system. Michael Craton uses computer techniques in the first of three main parts of his study to provide a dynamic analysis of the demographic, health, and socioeconomic characteristics of the Worthy Park slaves as a whole. The surprising diversity and complex interrelation of the population are underlined in Part Two, consisting of detailed biographies of more than 40 individual members of the plantation's society, including whites and mulattoes as well as black slaves. This is the most ambitious attempt yet made to overcome the stereotyping ignorance of contemporary white writers and the muteness of the slaves themselves. Part Three is perhaps the most original section of the book. After tracing the fate of the population between the emancipation of 1838 and the present day through genealogies and oral interviews, Craton concludes that the predominant feature of plantation life has not been change but continuity, and that the accepted definitions of slavery need considerable modification.
A detailed study of the economies and material cultures that slaves built among themselves in two of the most heavily developed plantation regions in the Americas. Focusing on two geographical areas that led in the production of sugar--Jamaica in the 18th century and Louisiana in the mid-19th century--McDonald (history, Rider College) examines the resourceful efforts slaves on the sugar plantations made to better their circumstances under working conditions that were among the most taxing endured by slaves anywhere. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
A book that rewrites the history of American prosperity and inequality Unequal Gains offers a radically new understanding of the economic evolution of the United States, providing a complete picture of the uneven progress of America from colonial times to today. While other economic historians base their accounts on American wealth, Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson focus instead on income—and the result is a bold reassessment of the American economic experience. America has been exceptional in its rising inequality after an egalitarian start, but not in its long-run growth. America had already achieved world income leadership by 1700, not just in the twentieth century as is commonly thought. Long before independence, American colonists enjoyed higher living standards than Britain—and America's income advantage today is no greater than it was three hundred years ago. But that advantage was lost during the Revolution, lost again during the Civil War, and lost a third time during the Great Depression, though it was regained after each crisis. In addition, Lindert and Williamson show how income inequality among Americans rose steeply in two great waves—from 1774 to 1860 and from the 1970s to today—rising more than in any other wealthy nation in the world. Unequal Gains also demonstrates how the widening income gaps have always touched every social group, from the richest to the poorest. The book sheds critical light on the forces that shaped American income history, and situates that history in a broad global context. Economic writing at its most stimulating, Unequal Gains provides a vitally needed perspective on who has benefited most from American growth, and why.
A renowned historian offers novel perspectives on slavery and abolition in eighteenth-century Jamaica Between the start of the Seven Years' War in 1756 and the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, Jamaica was the richest and most important colony in British America. White Jamaican slaveowners presided over a highly productive economic system, a precursor to the modern factory in its management of labor, its harvesting of resources, and its scale of capital investment and ouput. Planters, supported by a dynamic merchant class in Kingston, created a plantation system in which short-term profit maximization was the main aim. Their slave system worked because the planters who ran it were extremely powerful. In Jamaica in the Age of Revolution, Trevor Burnard analyzes the men and women who gained so much from the labor of enslaved people in Jamaica to expose the ways in which power was wielded in a period when the powerful were unconstrained by custom, law, or, for the most part, public approbation or disapproval. Burnard finds that the unremitting war by the powerful against the poor and powerless, evident in the day-to-day struggles slaves had with masters, is a crucial context for grasping what enslaved people had to endure. Examining such events as Tacky's Rebellion of 1760 (the largest slave revolt in the Caribbean before the Haitian Revolution), the Somerset decision of 1772, and the murder case of the Zong in 1783 in an Atlantic context, Burnard reveals Jamiaca to be a brutally effective and exploitative society that was highly adaptable to new economic and political circumstances, even when placed under great stress, as during the American Revolution. Jamaica in the Age of Revolution demonstrates the importance of Jamaican planters and merchants to British imperial thinking at a time when slavery was unchallenged.
First published in 1988, this volume contains a representative sample of the large collection of plantation maps and plans in the National Library of Jamaica. It explores the diversity of agricultural activity on the island and the changing patterns of land use during the 18th and 19th centuries.
"Holt greatly extends and deepens our understanding of the emancipation experience when, for just over a century, the people of Jamaica struggled to achieve their own vision of freedom and autonomy against powerful conservative forces."-David Barry Gaspar.
It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children. Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.
