As he rose to leadership of the Spencean Philanthropists in 1817, Robert Wedderburn wrote and published six issues of Axe Laid to the Root, an inexpensive weekly periodical for working-class readers. Axe Laid to the Root instructed its white audience about the radical potential of African-Jamaican land and food-based liberation. The provision grounds, plots set apart from the plantation for enslaved people to grow their own food, were a source of resistance to plantation capitalism, providing food sovereignty and communal identity. The ecological knowledge of the Jamaican Maroons was another source of resistance to plantation economies. Finally, Wedderburn’s writing in “cheap” periodicals aspired to cultivate a transatlantic alliance between the English lower classes, the colonized Irish, and free and enslaved people in Jamaica. The chapter concludes by discussing George Cruikshank’s The New Union Club, which features Wedderburn as a central figure within abolitionist circles.

In the nineteenth century, European attitudes, both among intellectuals and the public, shifted toward widespread support for imperialism, but the tensions between such views and long-standing values sometimes gave this support a tortuous and melancholy character. This was the case with two eminent liberal imperialists, both famous as champions of liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. Each rejected the other’s justifications for foreign expansion and described his own country’s policies in terms so negative that they might have served better to justify opposition, testifying that there was a destabilizing tension in the backing both gave to imperial expansion. One occasion on which harsh and direct criticism of empire was voiced was expressed was at the outbreak of the “Opium War” in 1839, a conflict whose complex origins belie the old myth that it was undertaken to stuff the dangerous drug down Indian throats. The chapter ends by examining reasons why this opposition was unable to hold back the imperial juggernaut and notes that a significant number of non-European anti-imperial activists found London and Paris hospitable places for their activities.

This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

The Gentleman’s Son’ provides a brief account of the Long family from the time of the conquest of Jamaica in 1655 to the mid-eighteenth century, their marriages and children, their acquisition of property in land and enslaved people, their politics. It introduces the main cast of characters in the Long/Beeston family and what became the three distinct branches: the slave-owners in Jamaica, the merchant family in London and the landed gentry in Suffolk. Edward’s two great-grandfathers, Samuel Long and William Beeston, were founding figures of Jamaica as a slave society. Samuel Long’s acquisition of what was to become Longville and his purchase of Lucky Valley set the seal on the Jamaican family’s ownership of property and enslaved people, the source of their wealth for generations to come. What did it mean to be a colonist? Samuel’s great-grandson Edward, born in 1734, grew up in England and as a child lived in Cornwall. His father returned to Jamaica with the rest of the family to retrieve the family fortune by better management of the plantations. Edward was left alone for his education.

Edward Long’s History of Jamaica was published in 1774 and has been in print ever since. It was a text designed to legitimate slavery as central to Britain’s wealth and power and to encourage new white settlers to come to the island. A judgment by Lord Mansfield had persuaded the slave-owners that they could no longer rely on the law to protect their ‘property’ in enslaved men and women. New legitimations were necessary and Long’s encyclopaedic History, encompassing population, politics, the economy, law, and the topography and natural history of the island, was structured around a defence of slavery and natural difference. Long’s History continues to be read by numerous scholars interested in racial difference and in eighteenth-century Britain and its relation to the Caribbean. But it has never been fully contextualized either in his family history or in his place in the Enlightenment. An Enlightenment man, Long was determined to represent plantation slavery as a civilizing process for barbarous Africans. Nor has the History been thought about in terms of its relevance to the present. Key concepts utilized in the analysis of his work are introduced, including racial capitalism, racialization, reproduction and disavowal.

This chapter explores enchantment and speculation as features of contemporary black literature, connecting earlier forms of Pan-Africanist gathering to twenty-first-century preoccupations with genre fiction and popular culture. As political critiques of racialized capitalism intensify to include queries about the fundamental assumptions of materialism, black authors in a variety of settings and genres have drawn on forms of the immaterial – religion, spirituality, magic, ghostly haunts – to ground and illuminate possibilities for black art and life. The chapter first contextualizes the historical background of contemporary black literature and then explores contemporary models of gathering or cohesion based on such radiant effects as the sound wave, the empathic transfer, and the spirit. Two novels by radically searching black writers, Erna Brodber and Octavia Butler, help ground the chapter, as both authors demonstrate the thematic and formal possibilities of nonmaterialist thinking in global black literature and culture. Brodber’s experimentation with ideas from a variety of Afro-descended religious traditions in tandem with Butler’s genre-inflected vision of apocalypse and survival present a vision of black collaboration across difference, timescape, and distance – and demonstrate a prevailing investment in the potential for black (re)gathering on the other side of, in the wake of, catastrophe.

This chapter analyses the wars of independence in Spanish America from the perspective of the Caribbean coast of South America, arguing that this stretch of coast (the pardo coast) constituted a cohesive and coherent geographical space with dynamics that resulted from its demographic structure and geographical location. Because people of African descent constituted the majority of the population of Caribbean South America, a focus on the pardo coast reveals the central role they played during the conflicts that led to the creation of Colombia and Venezuela. Because the pardo coast was in such close proximity to the Caribbean islands, the independence process in the area was greatly determined by what its leaders could achieve in Jamaica and Haiti. Because it was the gateway to South America, the pardo coast was at the vanguard of some of the most modern political experiments of the era and was the center of some of the most violent confrontations of the wars. In short, a focus on the pardo coast offers a useful recalibration of scale that makes visible processes that often get lost in analyses that use national frameworks as units of analysis or that are perceived as uniquely local.

Publications were the most important links to Enlightenment intellectual culture across the Atlantic World. Jamaicans acquired publications in quantity despite the difficulty and expense, challenging the colonial reputation of philistinism. The trade in books and periodicals was connected to a commercial revolution that brought a variety of cultural commodities—musical instruments, telescopes, globes, etc.—to colonial and metropolitan doorsteps. These objects helped assert their owners’ gentility: a wealthy planter might house his collection in a suitably dignified library, but a Kingston businessman could showcase his modest collection in a mahogany bookcase, and a merchant based in a small coastal town could increase his intellectual capital by borrowing reading material from neighbors and friends. Evidence drawn from a variety of sources—advertisements for books and book furnishings; book orders and library inventories; accounts of borrowing and lending—show that Jamaican readers could satisfy a desire for everything from the classics of Antiquity to now-canonical Enlightenment works, from sentimental and scurrilous novels to popularizing works of science and practical how-to treatises.

The goals of this book have been to recover a distinctive “Caribbean Enlightenment” and to show how it contributes to our understandings of eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean societies and the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan movement. Largely focused on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, it has explored four important Enlightenment themes in Caribbean contexts: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. It identifies many White male colonists who embraced Enlightenment practices and, in the process, asserted a colonial identity that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave. The Conclusion suggests future lines of research, such as the comparative vigor of the Enlightenment in French and British colonies and the relationship between the enslaved and free people of color to Enlightenment intellectual culture. Remarking how rapidly White colonists accustomed themselves to their brutal and lucrative slave societies, the Conclusion invites us to consider the consequences of globalization and the moral implications and real-world consequences of political economy in the twenty-first as well as the eighteenth century.

This chapter traces debates and arguments around black freedom that animated discussions on amelioration and emancipation in both British metropole and colony. Much of this was predicated on fear, where the ever present Hydra of slave rebellion and disorder threatened, even as enslaved people’s revolutionary acts helped stimulate a metropolitan abolitionist movement. The chapter argues that this preeminent association of black freedom with disorder shaped the boundaries of emancipation and thus the parameters of the experiment.

This chapter describes the process of choosing and preparing the data investigated in the present study. It starts with a definition of the notion of ‘culture’ and then introduces the data that form the basis for the analysis. The interactions analysed were extracted from two larger corpora, the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago. The chapter then describes how a collection of unscripted natural conversations was compiled for the project and briefly comments on the transcription process involved. It illustrates how qualitative analysis can be successfully combined with subsequent quantification and shows why this is essential in comparative conversation analytic research. The last part of the chapter provides a detailed description of the codification procedure and the formal coding system developed for the project, before summarising the steps involved in the quantitative part of the analysis.

The 1980s saw a shift in Black women’s literary production on and about Jamaica and its transnational relationship to the United States and Canada in particular. While these texts are largely set in Jamaica, they received acclaim among an international audience. This chapter offers a dialogue between dramaturgical reading and the Jamaican concept of ruination, evaluating how adopting the form of play text and dramatic writing aids in the creation of Black feminist writing on Jamaica’s place in the transnational imagination in North America. By mirroring both play text and production, a form that is always under the threat of temporal evaporation and erasure at the end of performance, a dramaturgical reading of these texts will evaluate how dramaturgical methods also serve as an apt analogy for the workings of ruination (something that is at once so fecund and rich that it resists all attempts at the imposition of permanence).

This chapter focuses on Hughes’s friendship with the Jamaican poet and dramatist Louise Bennett throughout the 1950s and ’60s. The chapter approaches their friendship by way of letters written by Hughes to Bennett, through Hughes’s discussion of Bennett in his correspondence with other Black male diasporic writers, and by examining his discussion of Bennett’s work in a 1955 article on transnational Black migration in the Chicago Defender. While Hughes’s response to Bennett’s work, particularly his consequent laughter, alludes to his convoluted relationship to diasporic women’s writing, these sources reveal how Bennett’s Jamaican and highly gendered folk poetry influenced Hughes’s understanding of transnational Black experience and identity. In addition, by orienting Bennett’s life and work transnationally through the lens of her relationship to Hughes, the chapter also attempts to shift discourse on her folk aesthetic beyond national and domestic frames. Among other things, doing so extends the parameters through which we can interpret humor’s function in Bennett’s embodied performance of Jamaican folk culture.