The Journal of Caribbean History Volume 58 Issue 1
Edited by Professor Kathleen E. A. Monteith
Editorial Board
Kathleen E.A. Monteith
Professor of History,
The University of the West Indies
(Mona)
Heather Cateau
Senior Lecturer in History,
The University of the West Indies (St Augustine)
Alan Cobley
Professor of History,
The University the West Indies (Cave Hill)
Aviston Downes
Senior Lecturer in History,
The University of the West Indies (Cave Hill)
Dexnell Peters
Lecturer in History,
The University of the West Indies (Mona)
Hilary Beckles
Vice-Chancellor,
The University of the West Indies
Richard J.M. Blackett
Emeritus Andrew Jackson Professor of History,
Vanderbilt University, USA
Bridget Brereton
Emerita Professor of History,
The University of the West Indies
Patrick Bryan
Emeritus Professor of History,
The University of the West Indies
Carl C. Campbell
Emeritus Professor of History,
The University of the West Indies
B.W. Higman
Emeritus Professor of History,
Australian National University and the University of the West Indies
Franklin W. Knight
Emeritus Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History,
Johns Hopkins University,
USA
Woodville Marshall
Emeritus Professor of History,
The University of the West Indies
Brian Moore
Emeritus Professor of History,
Colgate University,
USA
Verene Shepherd
Emerita Professor of History and Director,
The University of the West Indies Centre for Reparation Research
Matthew J. Smith
Professor of History, and Director for the Study of Legacies of British Slavery,
University College of London, UK
Pedro L.V. Welch
Emeritus Professor of History,
The University of the West Indies
Contents
DOI: 10.37234/JCH.2024.5801.A001
The Haitian revolutionary leader Jeannot is described in the historiography as a violent and sadistic figure who was executed because of his excessive violence. Critically examining available sources, this article argues instead that Jeannot was killed because he stood for an aggressive revolutionary strategy, which managed to unite a broad movement and aimed at the complete abolition of the system of slavery as opposed to the reformism pursued by those who had him killed. By revising the narrative surrounding Jeannot, this article sheds light on the political visions of the first Haitian revolutionaries, as well as the political divisions amongst them.
DOI: 10.37234/JCH.2024.5801.A002
This article examines the alleged decline in population on St Eustatius after emancipation in 1863 using the emancipation register, the civil records, colonial reports and newspaper articles. Previous research on post-emancipation migration in the Caribbean has not yet turned its attention to the Dutch Leeward Islands. Meanwhile, the discussion on the slavery history of St Eustatius has experienced an almost fifty-year hiatus. Variables like sex, age, and occupation played a crucial role in determining both the possibilities and opportunities for migrating. In turn, these differentials resulted in multiple markers of identity for migrants.
DOI: 10.37234/JCH.2024.5801.A003
Very few records written by black Caribbean women in the 1800s exist in the archives. An exception to this are three letters written by Ann M. Beaudhuy, born on St Croix around 1812. She came from humble circumstances and worked for many years as a nanny for a white Danish family, the Rothes. The head of the family, Louis Rothe, held a high position in the colonial administration. However, when he fell fatally ill in 1870 the family moved back to Denmark. As a consequence, Beaudhuy lost her job, her home, and the access to valuable networks that her employment had provided. In the following year, she wrote a series of letters to one of the Rothe children, the now adult Clara Rothe, who had married a few years earlier and moved to Europe. Beaudhuy’s three letters are a rare testimony to her as a person and the time she lived in. The letters project her own voice and words, not filtered through the colonial administration as most Caribbean records of that time. It is Beaudhuy who wields the pen herself, and the letters give a rare insight to colonial life as she experienced it in the early 1870s.
DOI: 10.37234/JCH.2024.5801.A004
This biographical essay traces the life of the first Trinidadian to play professional football in England. It explores his leadership of Everton, the first major black team to win all the major trophies in the early thirties, and, following their suspension from the game because of an infraction, Charles’ signing with Burnley in the English second division. It then turns its attention to Charles’ playing days in England.
Book Review
DOI: 10.37234/JCH.2024.5801.R001
In Offshore Attachments: Intimacy and Oil in the Caribbean, Chelsea Schields traces the intimate arrangements capitalists and state authorities cultivated to facilitate and accommodate the rise and fall of oil refinery in the Dutch Caribbean from the 1930s through to the 1980s. Moving beyond the manual and intellectual waged and salaried labour of male industry workers, the book demonstrates how oil companies and their state facilitators exploited the domestic, reproductive, and sexual labour of women to transform oil into a wealth producing commodity. Attentive to government subsidies and legal manoeuvres that allowed oil companies to skirt prohibitions on prostitution and import sex workers from the Dominican Republic and Columbia, exoticized and eroticized for their presumed whiteness; police and enforce the conjugal conformity of local families, including state sponsored and subsidized reproductive interventions responsive to the booms and busts of the oil industry, Schields gives intimacy a double-meaning. In addition to the tethering of the bedroom to the boardroom and the state, the geopolitics and revenue potential ascribed to the energy economy, made cozy bedfellows of the government and oil industry. Tellingly, Schields summarized, “To aid oil companies maximizing revenue through the suppression of wage expenditures and housing costs, Dutch colonial authorities violated [international] anti-trafficking laws to illegally move sex workers across international boundaries (just as, paradoxically, laws banning brothel keeping turned unlikely settings into [government] staging grounds for commercial sex.” In using the concept offshore, Schields warns against assuming it is “the antithesis of regulatory capitalism”. Offshore, she insists, is an “entangled space” furnished for “legal innovation” enabling the consolidation of wealth through “the selective application of [government] oversight”.
DOI: 10.37234/JCH.2024.5801.R002
Kenneth Morgan’s A Concise History of Jamaica is a survey history of the island from its earliest inhabitants to 2022. Drawing on both primary and secondary source material, the author covers the main political, economic, social and cultural events and changes that have characterised Jamaica’s development for over a thousand years. Not the first in its scope, the book updates the historiographical field of the island for modern audiences. It joins the long list of concise histories put out by Cambridge University Press to bring a wide array of knowledge to general readers. This is evident in its overall simple, easy-to-read narrative structure, seamlessly organized by specific periods and not overwhelmed with citations. At the same time while maintaining readability for its intended audience, the book does not shy away from providing deep insights.
Notes on Contributors
An Emeritus Andrew Jackson Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, USA.
A Postdoctoral Fellow in the SAXO Institute at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Pursuing a PhD in History at Lund University, Sweden.
A lecturer in History at the University of the West Indies, Mona.
Pursuing a PhD in History in the Radboud Institute of Culture and History, at Radboud University, Netherlands.
An Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins
University, USA.