In 1974, McIntyre temporarily left behind his academic career as a developmental economist at the University of the West Indies to take up appointment as Secretary-General of CARICOM (the Caribbean Community and Common Market). He subsequently held positions as the Director of the Commodities Division of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and then Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD in both Geneva and New York. In 1988 McIntyre returned to the Caribbean as Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and, on his retirement in 1998, he assumed the post of Chief Technical Advisor at the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery. This book outlines McIntyre's extraordinary life and wide-ranging international career in diplomacy, politics and academia. It provides key perspectives on the development of Caribbean regional government and international institutions in the twentieth century.
A region victimized by natural hazards, soil erosion, overpopulation and gunboat diplomacy is portrayed in this examination of successive waves of colonization of the Caribbean and the effects on its peoples over the past 500 years.
DIVHow did colonial Georgia, an economic backwater in its early days, make its way into the burgeoning Caribbean and Atlantic economies where trade spilled over national boundaries, merchants operated in multiple markets, and the transport of enslaved Africans bound together four continents? In On the Rim of the Caribbean, Paul M. Pressly interprets Georgia's place in the Atlantic world in light of recent work in transnational and economic history. He considers how a tiny elite of newly arrived merchants, adapting to local culture but loyal to a larger vision of the British empire, led the colony into overseas trade. From this perspective, Pressly examines the ways in which Georgia came to share many of the characteristics of the sugar islands, how Savannah developed as a "Caribbean" town, the dynamics of an emerging slave market, and the role of merchant-planters as leaders in forging a highly adaptive economic culture open to innovation. The colony's rapid growth holds a larger story: how a frontier where Carolinians played so large a role earned its own distinctive character. Georgia's slowness in responding to the revolutionary movement, Pressly maintains, had a larger context. During the colonial era, the lowcountry remained oriented to the West Indies and Atlantic and failed to develop close ties to the North American mainland as had South Carolina. He suggests that the American Revolution initiated the process of bringing the lowcountry into the orbit of the mainland, a process that would extend well beyond the Revolution./div
In 1974, McIntyre temporarily left behind his academic career as a developmental economist at the University of the West Indies to take up appointment as Secretary-General of CARICOM (the Caribbean Community and Common Market). He subsequently held positions as the Director of the Commodities Division of UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and then Deputy Secretary-General of UNCTAD in both Geneva and New York. In 1988 McIntyre returned to the Caribbean as Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies and, on his retirement in 1998, he assumed the post of Chief Technical Advisor at the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery. This book outlines McIntyre's extraordinary life and wide-ranging international career in diplomacy, politics and academia. It provides key perspectives on the development of Caribbean regional government and international institutions in the twentieth century.
Combining Atlantic and imperial perspectives, Caribbean New Orleans offers a lively portrait of the city and a probing investigation of the French colonists who established racial slavery there as well as the African slaves who were forced to toil for them. Casting early New Orleans as a Caribbean outpost of the French Empire rather than as a North American frontier town, Cecile Vidal reveals the persistent influence of the Antilles, especially Saint-Domingue, which shaped the city's development through the eighteenth century. In so doing, she urges us to rethink our usual divisions of racial systems into mainland and Caribbean categories. Drawing on New Orleans's rich court records as a way to capture the words and actions of its inhabitants, Vidal takes us into the city's streets, market, taverns, church, hospitals, barracks, and households. She explores the challenges that slow economic development, Native American proximity, imperial rivalry, and the urban environment posed to a social order that was predicated on slave labor and racial hierarchy. White domination, Vidal demonstrates, was woven into the fabric of New Orleans from its founding. This comprehensive history of urban slavery locates Louisiana's capital on a spectrum of slave societies that stretched across the Americas and provides a magisterial overview of racial discourses and practices during the formative years of North America's most intriguing city.
High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy is an ethnography of globalization positioned at the intersection between political economy and cultural studies. Carla Freeman’s fieldwork in Barbados grounds the processes of transnational capitalism—production, consumption, and the crafting of modern identities—in the lives of Afro-Caribbean women working in a new high-tech industry called “informatics.” It places gender at the center of transnational analysis, and local Caribbean culture and history at the center of global studies. Freeman examines the expansion of the global assembly line into the realm of computer-based work, and focuses specifically on the incorporation of young Barbadian women into these high-tech informatics jobs. As such, Caribbean women are seen as integral not simply to the workings of globalization but as helping to shape its very form. Through the enactment of “professionalism” in both appearances and labor practices, and by insisting that motherhood and work go hand in hand, they re-define the companies’ profile of “ideal” workers and create their own “pink-collar” identities. Through new modes of dress and imagemaking, the informatics workers seek to distinguish themselves from factory workers, and to achieve these new modes of consumption, they engage in a wide array of extra income earning activities. Freeman argues that for the new Barbadian pink-collar workers, the globalization of production cannot be viewed apart from the globalization of consumption. In doing so, she shows the connections between formal and informal economies, and challenges long-standing oppositions between first world consumers and third world producers, as well as white-collar and blue-collar labor. Written in a style that allows the voices of the pink-collar workers to demonstrate the simultaneous burdens and pleasures of their work, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy will appeal to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, women’s studies, political economy, and Caribbean studies, as well as labor and postcolonial studies.
The first comparative treatment of settlers' trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean Brimming with new perspectives and cutting-edge research, the essays collected in The Torrid Zone explore colonization and cultural interaction in the Caribbean from the late 1600s to the early 1800s--a period known as the "long" seventeenth century--a time when these encounters varied widely and the diverse actors were not yet fully enmeshed in the culture and power dynamics of master-slave relations. The events of this era would profoundly affect the social and political development both of the colonies that Europeans established in the Caribbean and the wider world. This book is the first to offer comparative treatments of Danish, Dutch, English, and French trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean and analysis of the corresponding interactions among people of African, European, and Native origin. The contributions range from an investigation of the indigenous colonization of the Lesser Antilles by the Kalinago to a look at how the Anglo-Dutch wars in Europe affected relations between the English inhabitants and the Dutch government of Suriname. Among the other essays are incisive examinations of the often-neglected history of Danish settlement in the Virgin Islands, attempts to establish French colonial authority over the pirates of Saint-Domingue, and how the Caribbean blueprint for colonization manifested itself in South Carolina through enslavement of Amerindians and the establishment of plantation agriculture. The extensive geographic, demographic, and thematic concerns of this collection shed a clear light on the socioeconomic character of the "Torrid Zone" before and during the emergence and extension of the sugar-and-slaves complex that came to define this region. The book is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the social, political, and economic sensibilities to which the operators around the Caribbean subscribed as well as to our understanding of what they did, offering in turn a better comprehension of the consequences of their behavior.
This book brings together leading scholars of Caribbean education from around the world. Schooling continues to hold a special place both as a means to achieve social mobility and as a mechanism for supporting the economy of Caribbean nations. In this book, the Caribbean includes the Greater and Lesser Antilles. The Greater Antilles is made up of the five larger islands (and six countries) of the northern Caribbean, including the Cayman Islands, Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. The Lesser Antilles includes the Windward and Leeward Islands which are inclusive of Barbados, St. Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago along with several other islands. Each chapter provides a unique perspective on the various social and cultural issues that define Caribbean education and schooling. The Handbook on Caribbean Education fills a void in the literature and documents the important research being done throughout the Caribbean. Creating a space where Caribbean voices are a part of “international” discussions about 21st century global matters and concerns is an important contribution of this work.
A masterwork of travel literature and of history: voyaging from Cuba to Jamaica, Puerto Rico to Trinidad, Haiti to Barbados, and islands in between, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of each society, its culture and politics, connecting this region’s common heritage to its fierce grip on the world’s imagination. From the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa María's deck in 1492 at what he mistook for an island off Asia, the Caribbean has been subjected to the misunderstandings and fantasies of outsiders. Running roughshod over the place, they have viewed these islands and their inhabitants as exotic allure to be consumed or conquered. The Caribbean stood at the center of the transatlantic slave trade for more than three hundred years, with societies shaped by mass migrations and forced labor. But its people, scattered across a vast archipelago and separated by the languages of their colonizers, have nonetheless together helped make the modern world—its politics, religion, economics, music, and culture. Jelly-Schapiro gives a sweeping account of how these islands’ inhabitants have searched and fought for better lives. With wit and erudition, he chronicles this “place where globalization began,” and introduces us to its forty million people who continue to decisively shape our world.
