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The increasing visibility of individuals engaging in small-scale business enterprises outside formal wage employment has been a topic of debate for many years, in many countries. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is no exception. In fact, the informal economy has become a persistent feature of the regions economic landscape and has been thriving, as documented by leading Caribbean scholars.

Informal Commercial Importers in CARICOM is the first book to examine the various dimensions of informal commercial importing from an aggregate CARICOM perspective, emphasizing the economic dimensions and providing three empirical surveys of informal commercial importing in Guyana, Dominica and Jamaica. Roger Hosein and Martin Franklin provide a rich survey of the literature on shuttle trading, which aids in contextualizing the range of factors that has given rise to shuttle trading in CARICOM and enabled its longevity. They discuss the possible effects of formalizing the informal trade in CARICOM economies and propose strategies that can aid in this formalization process.

While this book is written to appeal to an academic audience, it also provides essential reading for policymakers, research scholars and practitioners alike, and it provides a foundation for further studies of the shuttle trade in a changing Caribbean.

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The British Parliaments decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807 had disastrous implications for plantation societies, such as Jamaica, in regards to the health and the labour of the enslaved population. Many of the Jamaican sugar planters could not accept the fact that the 1807 Abolition Act was a watershed moment which demanded a more conciliatory form of management and a willingness to implement critical labour reforms, such as task work. The failure to introduce these necessary internal reforms resulted in the continuing decline in the plantations crude production figures and in their productivity levels, despite the introduction of steam engines on many estates. The numerical strength of the enslaved population was also decreasing, and most important the health of the enslaved Africans was seriously declining. The planters failure to also eliminate their ambiguous management structure further hastened their own demise and the profitability of slavery in Jamaica.

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Valuable compilation of essays on education issues in Creole and Creole-influenced vernacular contexts. Essays divided into sections: Caribbean Language Education, Background to Caribbean Language (i.e., Caribbean English), Policy Issues and Perspectives on Vernacular Education in the Caribbean, among others.

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Using a range of primary sources from imperial, colonial and local government records, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, memoirs and reports, this study provides the most comprehensive account to date of public health in Jamaica in the post-emancipation colonial period to the onset of the Second World War. The account is framed by two pivotal Jamaican experiences that were vital in precipitating significant policy changes at the imperial centre. An examination of the development of the part-time colonial medical service reveals it to be underresourced and inadequate. Most Jamaicans accessed Western medical aid through the Poor Law, a distinguishing feature of the British West Indian colonies, and the issues around the intermeshing of medical and Poor Law aid is a vital contextual question. Chapters on the epidemic and endemic diseases of smallpox and malaria expose the attitudes and the nature of the responses of government, elites and the medical services to such threats. The International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation was active in Jamaica from 1919 until 1950. A detailed analysis of their hookworm campaign, public health education programme and tuberculosis work contributes to a critical understanding of this philanthropic endeavour.

The contribution of Jamaica to a new imperial development policy, as exemplified in the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act, is also assessed. A story of government and elite reluctance to finance public health services emerges in which Jamaicans were frequently blamed for their own ill health. Socio-economic causation was sidestepped as class and race perceptions, underpinned by the legacy of slavery, held sway.

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These plenary lectures from the Global Reggae conference convened at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica in 2008 eloquently exemplify the breadth and depth of current scholarship on Jamaican popular music. Radiating from the Jamaican centre, these illuminating essays highlight the glocalization of reggae  its global dispersal and adaptation in diverse local contexts of consumption and transformation.

The languages of Jamaican popular music, both literal and metaphorical, are first imitated in pursuit of an undeniable originality. Over time, as the music is indigenized, the Jamaican model loses its authority to varying degrees. The revolutionary ethos of reggae music is translated into local languages that articulate the particular politics of new cultural contexts. Echoes of the Jamaican source gradually fade. But new hybrid sounds return to their Jamaican origins, engendering polyvocal, cross-cultural dialogue.

From the inter/disciplinary perspectives of historical sociology, musicology, history, media studies, literature, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, the creative/cultural industries and, above all, the metaphorical life sciences, the contributors to this definitive volume lucidly articulate a cultural politics that acknowledges the far-reaching creativity of small-islanders with ancestral memories of continents of origin.

The globalisation of reggae music and its wild child dancehall is, indeed, an affirmation of the unquantifiable potential of the Jamaican people to reclaim identities and establish ties of affiliation that are not circumscribed by the Caribbean Sea: To the world!