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'Evocative, authentic and brilliantly told - a wonderful read.' David Lammy
Foreword by West Indies Cricketer Sir Clive Lloyd
Voices of the Windrush Generation is a powerful collection of stories from the men, women and children of the Windrush generation - West Indians who emigrated to Britain between 1948 and 1971 in response to labour shortages, and in search of a better life.
Edited by journalist and bestselling author David Matthews, this book paints a vivid portrait of what it meant for those who left the Caribbean for Britain during the early days of mass migration.
Through his own, and many other stories, Matthews explores: why and how so many people came to Britain after World War II, their hopes and dreams, the communities they formed and the difficulties they faced being separated from family and friends while integrating into an often hostile society. We hear how lives were transformed, and what became of the generations that followed, taking the reader right up to the present day, and the impact of the current Windrush deportation scandal upon everyday people.
At once a nostalgic treasure trove of human interest, which unearths the real stories behind the headlines, and a celebration of black British culture, Voices of the Windrush Generation is an absorbing and important book that gives a platform to voices that need to be heard.
Several small plantations co-existed with one large plantation during the first century of English settlement. However, by the 1740s, the space was entirely dominated by small plantations and by medium-sized farms; and it was evident that occupancy of the land was as much tied to residence and to various types of business activity (including land speculation) as it was to cultivation of the soil. Not surprisingly, by the 1850s and 1860s, many of the farms on the marginal land had been succeeded by villages that were created by some of the formerly enslaved population, and both proximity to Bridgetown and internal migration ensured that those villages by the early twentieth century were less farming settlements than residential districts, barely distinguishable from non-plantation tenantries.
In a final twist, an urban development programme of the 1960s ensured the continuation of hybrid characteristics in the use of the space. Middle-income housing estates were built and a university campus was established, and that development co-exists with the remnants of the earlier post-slavery villages.
Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, disposable workforce, fortunes that secured Britains place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place.
A prequel to Beckless equally compelling Britains Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britains Barbarity Time in Barbados, 16361876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.