Description

06

Bibliography

This remarkable description of Jamaica in the late 1680s was written by a contemporary English observer, John Taylor, who spent some months on the island. The original manuscript is held by the National Library of Jamaica, and has rarely been used by scholars. It contains information about Jamaica under the Spaniards, about the English invasion of 1655 and about the formation of the subsequent society, including the treatment of slaves. There are sections on the island's settlement and architecture, including a particularly full description of Port Royal. John Taylor sets out fifty current laws, many of them unknown to other such collections. He also carefully explains the nature of Jamaica's birds, beasts and plants. Taylor offers an image of the island before the general spread of sugar cultivation, citing some creatures now extinct in Jamaica; he also makes many suggestions about the medical use of natural products. His world is still one in which certain places are enchanted, though he also describes an island whose main features will be entirely familiar to modern Jamaicans. Buisseret's meticulous work on this manuscript has taken over twenty years and he provides an annotated version of the manuscript, which was originally more than 850 pages and was in three volumes. This edition covers the second half of volume 1 and the whole of volume 2, providing a rich tapestry of Taylor's observations and notes on Jamaica. Most of the remaining manuscript contains autobiographical material and nautical logs. Buisseret's edition provides an annotation and a glossary. The text will be useful to generations of scholars and students alike or to anyone with an interest in Jamaica and its colourful history. Co-published with the National Library of Jamaica and the Mill Press.

Description

06

Bibliography

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. Detailed case studies compare the attorney Simon Taylor's management of Golden Grove Estate in the decade before the American Revolution and Isaac Jackson's control of Montpelier in the years immediately following the abolition of slavery. These examples provide a wealth of information about plantation life and labour, technology, trade, investments and profits. 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, which makes the work accessible to Atlantic and Caribbean historians and to general readers as well. This book is critical in the ongoing historiographical debate about the impact of absenteeism in Jamaica, Great Britain's largest sugar-exporting colony. The sophisticated economic and social analysis reveals how managers, overseers and owners constructed an efficient value system, which permitted ethical behaviour among themselves yet perpetuated the brutal exploitation of plantation workers, enslaved and free.

Description

06

Bibliography

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus looks more deeply into the concept of social business, an alternative to unfettered capitalism that channels the best energies of capitalism while addressing pressing human needs, by showing how the theory and practice of this idea is growing in the business, academic and philanthropic worlds. Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and, with his Grameen Bank, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his world-changing efforts, here develops his bold new concept that promises to revolutionize the free-enterprise system: social business. Designed to fill the gap between profit-making and human needs, social business applies entrepreneurial thinking to problems like poverty, hunger, pollution, and disease, creating self-supporting, self-replicating enterprises that create jobs and generate economic growth even as they provide goods and services that make the world a better place. Partnering with some of the world's greatest corporations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have already launched several social businesses that are addressing challenges like malnutrition, lack of potable water, and endemic illness in Yunus' homeland of Bangladesh, and other organizations around the world are developing their own experiments in social business. In this book, Yunus traces the development of the social business idea; explains its lessons for entrepreneurs, social activists, and policy makers; offers practical guidance for those who want to create social businesses of their own; and, shows why social business holds the potential to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise.

Description

02

Bibliography