VOLUME 70 OF CQ MARKS A SPECIAL time in the history of the journal that turns seventy-five in 2024. This issue (no. 1) continues CQ’s tradition of publishing articles reflective of fresh takes on topics that have long interested scholars across the disciplines, but also stimulating perspectives on schools of thought that are emerging in academic discourse on the Caribbean.

Leading the issue is Kit Candlin’s essay that takes us back to the colonial
period of Guadeloupe’s history, and details the politics of the Fédon Rebellion in Grenada as seen through the eyes of Dr John Hay and the Revd Francis MacMahon, two “prominent members of Grenada’s British community” captured “by republican rebels” in the heights of France’s fight to maintain its control of the islands in the mid- to late-1790s. In relying primarily on books authored by both men, which arguably read like personal journals, Candlin considers these first-hand accounts as “histories of the Grenada conflict”. He argues that the recollections of Hay and MacMahon are further supported by “relatively unknown letters” sent from Victor Hugues, a white commissioner originally from Port-au-Prince sent by the French to “seize Guadeloupe from the British”, to Julien Fédon, “a small-time planter from the French, mixed-race community” whose vision for a “republican regime” in Grenada would materialise starting with “his attack on the British” resident in the colony. Candlin’s close reading of these archival sources underscores “the complexities of national belonging and identity in this period, especially between French whites who were bitterly divided by politics and ideology”.