Author: Eric WilliamsPublisher: A & B Book Dist Incorporated
ISBN: 9781881316640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
British Historians and the West Indies
Author: Eric WilliamsPublisher: A & B Book Dist Incorporated
ISBN: 9781881316640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
History of the British West Indies
Author: Sir Alan Cuthbert BurnsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 849
Book Description
Caribbean Wars Untold
Author: Humphrey MetzgenPublisher: University of the West Indies Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Book Description
The contribution made to Britain's wealth by its Caribbean colonies is well known. Far less known - indeed dismissively ignored - are the contributions made over the centuries by West Indians to Britain's hard-won military victories, most notably in the two World Wars. At last this injustice has been redressed. In this single volume, the authors tell the compelling story of the Caribbean during nearly five centuries of warfare from the time of Columbus to the present decade; of how West Indian consistently rallied to Britain's side in its many years of peril, volunteers for service in its armed forces or more recently also for work in its wartime factories and forests. The book spotlights the deeds and hardships of West Indian soldiers long engaged in Africa and the Middle East, and of the many who enlisted too in the air forces and merchant navies of the Allies. And it describes the ferocious German submarine campaign in Caribbean waters, the impact that it had on life in the islands and how it was defeated; and it defines also the consequences - social, political and economic - of the World Wars on both the British West Indies and the United Kingdom. Above all, this book is written as a tribute to every West Indian veteran of Britain's wars; also to foster in the generation now growing up an awareness of the sacrifices of their forebears and pride in their achievements.
Capitalism and Slavery
Author: Eric WilliamsPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469619490
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Book Description
Slavery helped finance the Industrial Revolution in England. Plantation owners, shipbuilders, and merchants connected with the slave trade accumulated vast fortunes that established banks and heavy industry in Europe and expanded the reach of capitalism worldwide. Eric Williams advanced these powerful ideas in Capitalism and Slavery, published in 1944. Years ahead of its time, his profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, Williams's study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that set the tone for future studies. In a new introduction, Colin Palmer assesses the lasting impact of Williams's groundbreaking work and analyzes the heated scholarly debates it generated when it first appeared.
British Historians and the West Indies
Author: Eric Eustace WilliamsPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Historians
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean
Author: Randy M. BrownePublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812294270
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Book Description
A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive. Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death. Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.
An Empire Divided
Author: Andrew Jackson O'ShaughnessyPublisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812293398
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375
Book Description
There were 26—not 13—British colonies in America in 1776. Of these, the six colonies in the Caribbean—Jamaica, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Grenada and Tobago, St. Vincent; and Dominica—were among the wealthiest. These island colonies were closely related to the mainland by social ties and tightly connected by trade. In a period when most British colonists in North America lived less than 200 miles inland and the major cities were all situated along the coast, the ocean often acted as a highway between islands and mainland rather than a barrier. The plantation system of the islands was so similar to that of the southern mainland colonies that these regions had more in common with each other, some historians argue, than either had with New England. Political developments in all the colonies moved along parallel tracks, with elected assemblies in the Caribbean, like their mainland counterparts, seeking to increase their authority at the expense of colonial executives. Yet when revolution came, the majority of the white island colonists did not side with their compatriots on the mainland. A major contribution to the history of the American Revolution, An Empire Divided traces a split in the politics of the mainland and island colonies after the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765-66, when the colonists on the islands chose not to emulate the resistance of the patriots on the mainland. Once war came, it was increasingly unpopular in the British Caribbean; nonetheless, the white colonists cooperated with the British in defense of their islands. O'Shaughnessy decisively refutes the widespread belief that there was broad backing among the Caribbean colonists for the American Revolution and deftly reconstructs the history of how the island colonies followed an increasingly divergent course from the former colonies to the north.
Sugar and Slaves
Author: Richard S. DunnPublisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 0807899828
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
First published by UNC Press in 1972, Sugar and Slaves presents a vivid portrait of English life in the Caribbean more than three centuries ago. Using a host of contemporary primary sources, Richard Dunn traces the development of plantation slave society in the region. He examines sugar production techniques, the vicious character of the slave trade, the problems of adapting English ways to the tropics, and the appalling mortality rates for both blacks and whites that made these colonies the richest, but in human terms the least successful, in English America. "A masterly analysis of the Caribbean plantation slave society, its lifestyles, ethnic relations, afflictions, and peculiarities.--Journal of Modern History "A remarkable account of the rise of the planter class in the West Indies. . . . Dunn's [work] is rich social history, based on factual data brought to life by his use of contemporary narrative accounts.--New York Review of Books "A study of major importance. . . . Dunn not only provides the most solid and precise account ever written of the social development of the British West Indies down to 1713, he also challenges some traditional historical cliches.--American Historical Review
The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery
Author: Eric WilliamsPublisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442231408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 279
Book Description
In his influential and widely debated Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams examined the relation of capitalism and slavery in the British West Indies. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, his study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that has set the tone for an entire field. Williams’s profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development and has been widely debated since the book’s initial publication in 1944. The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery now makes available in book form for the first time his dissertation, on which Capitalism and Slavery was based. The significant differences between his two works allow us to rethink questions that were considered resolved and to develop fresh problems and hypotheses. It offers the possibility of a much deeper reconsideration of issues that have lost none of their urgency—indeed, whose importance has increased.
British West Indian Slavery, 1750-1834
Author: J. R. WardPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372
Book Description
The first account of Caribbean slavery to draw from the plantation records of several different sugar colonies, this book examines the attempts made by British West Indian planters to improve the treatment of their slaves, partly in response to the anti-slavery movement. Ward argues that although the measures taken did raise the standard of living and productive efficiency of plantation slaves, "amelioration" contained serious weaknesses that made it ultimately ineffective as a means of defending the institution of slavery. Though focused on the British West Indies, the book's main theme--the potential for reform and economic development in slave-based societies--will hold wider significance for a variety of economic and social historians.