Description

Plantation Jamaica"" analyses the important but neglected role of the attorneys who managed estates, chiefly for absentee proprietors, and assesses their efficiency and impact on Jamaica during slavery and freedom. Meticulous research based on a variety of sources, including the attorneys' letters, plantation papers and slave registration records, provides rich quantitative and literary data describing the attorneys' role, status, range of activities and demographic characteristics. Higman charts both the extent of absentee ownership and the complex structure of the managerial hierarchy that stretched across the Atlantic. Higman also makes a unique contribution by investigating and describing several topics previously neglected including the postal service, the history of accounting and the role of attorneys in the British Isles. The writing style is clear, persuasive and elegant, and makes the work accessible to not only Atlantic and Caribbean historians but also to general readers.

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B.W. Higman is William Keith Hancock Professor of History, Australian National University, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. His award-winning publications include Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History; Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834, which won the Elsa Goveia Prize of the Association of Caribbean Historians; and Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739-1912, which also won an Elsa Goveia Prize and an award from the Jamaica National Heritage Trust.

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This work discusses the effectiveness of the sets of policies employed by the government over a fifty-year period spanning 1958 to 2008 in the effort to foster the growth and development of the economy. It concludes that Trinidad and Tobago has underperformed in respect of its growth and development. Compared with other countries more or less similarly placed around 1960, Trinidad and Tobago has not achieved in key areas of health-care delivery, education access, and income and wealth, notwithstanding its substantial resources of oil and gas.

Historically, Trinidad and Tobagos economy cycles from boom to bust depending on what happens to the price of oil. The carefree, undisciplined lifestyle of most of the population is occasionally perturbed by a paroxysm of social unrest. Downturns are accompanied by ritual incantations by government officials of the need for diversification to reduce the countrys dependence on oil and the energy-based industries, the formation of new committees, task forces and boards, and considerable hand-wringing and angst about the sustainability of government fiscal operations. Seemingly bold new initiatives and projects are announced, and all the while people wait and secretly hope for a quick turnaround in the price of oil, ammonia, methanol and natural gas so that rents will again begin to accrue, government spending programmes can restart and the fête can resume. Trinidad and Tobago will not achieve its potential for development unless and until this cycle is broken.

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The Caribbean Heritage series is designed to publish new editions of historically significant works of fiction from our region. The first three volumes in the series comprise four Trinidadian novels published between 1838 and 1907. A substantial introduction and thorough annotations contextualize each of the original texts. The first volume in the series is E.L. Joseph's Warner Arundell: The Adventures of a Creole. The second volume includes two novels: Adolphus, A Tale, and Mrs Wilkins's The Slave Son. The third volume in the series presents Stephen Cobham's novel Rupert Gray, first published in 1907. Like the other novels in the series, this work also contains a strong political impetus, typical of West Indian novels, including support for the rights of all races. Together these four texts establish evidence of a much older and deeper local literary foundation than hitherto realized. This novel was written in Trinidad by a black or mixed-race teacher then law clerk, who also wrote poems and gave public lectures on literary topics. The character of Rupert Gray was apparently based on that of Henry Sylvester Williams, a black lawyer educated in England, who was a major figure in the Pan-African Association. The novel traces the love affair of Rupert Gray, a Negro accountant, and Gwendoline Serle, the daughter of a white businessman in Trinidad. The couple's interracial courtship is marked by parental disapproval, society's scorn and the loyalty of friends. A series of tragic events culminates in a melodramatic courtroom scene.

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The contributors to this collection address a range of issues in Caribbean linguistics. At this stage of Caribbean development, it is critical that we have a broader appreciation of the significance of the languages of the region for developing a deeper sense of self and for understanding others who have shared a common Caribbean experience. The linguists in this volume interrogate the interpretations of the history of our Caribbean languages, the use of these languages for literary expression and their role in the democratization of education and the development of Caribbean people. Several of the articles deal with profoundly controversial topics, including the question of competence in a Creole environment; the expansion of Rastafarianism globally and how word-formation devices reflect Rastafarian thinking; the use of the vernacular in West Indian education; the relevance of vernacular literacy for education; the use of Creole in Caribbean literary texts; and how to determine dialect boundaries, especially in linguistic situations in which Creoles from two distinct lexical bases vie for social space and supremacy. The work is dedicated to the distinguished Caribbean linguist Pauline Christie and celebrates her contribution to the study of linguistics in the Caribbean.