Colonial laws maintained the social and physical security of English settlements in the New World. This essay compares those laws that attempted to define and regulate servants and labour in seventeenth-century Virginia and Jamaica. The laws reveal differences in the social composition of their early populations and in the relationships each colony had with the imperial government. Earlier laws reflect a greater concern with the economic value of labour. In the last two decades, however, the laws defined new social constructs that would dominate slave laws in the next century. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
In 1838 Jamaica officially abolished slavery. After 1838 several American missionaries went to the island to assist the former slaves in their transition to freedom. Several of these missionaries were a part of the American Missionary Association, a nonsectarian abolitionist organization established in 1846 with missions in various parts of the world. Many missionaries hoped to use Jamaica as a test case for emancipating slaves in the United States. This article focuses on the missionaries and their endeavours in Jamaica between 1847 and 1858. It centres on Dr. Hyde and how his doctrinal and sexual activities polarized the AMA Jamaica Mission. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
"Alexander Bedward, minister of the revivalist Jamaica Native Baptist Free Church during the period 1889-1921, emerged as one of the island's earliest black nationalists. Under the guise of religion Bedward called on the black majority to rise up and take action against the prevailing system of racial discrimination, socio-economic deprivation, injustice, the tyranny of minority colonial rule, and to establish a government representative of the people. While he was revered by the masses, attracting thousands of followers at home and abroad, he was feared by the upper classes and colonial authorities, who saw him as a threat to political stability. An antagonistic relationship developed between the government and Bedward. Eventually, he was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to the lunatic asylum, where he later died." (publication abstract);
The revisionings proposed by Sultana Afroz regarding the pervasiveness of the African Islamic presence in plantation Jamaica are contested, on grounds of her falsification of demographic data and of contemporary historical sources, non-differentiation in the treatment of historical processes in West Africa, unsubstantiated or inadequate proof of claims, attribution of causality and relatedness to parallel phenomena, questionable etymological assertions, unfamiliarity with African cultural history, and a general tendency to make exaggerated and dogmatic statements. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
The Awardee for the 30th Norman Washington Manley Award for Excellence was Jamaican historian Douglas Hall. The Norman Washington Manley Foundation decided that the award this year should go to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the nation in the field of history. Here, Bryan describes the 1999 recepient of the Norman Washington Manley Award for Excellence, Professor Douglas Gordon Hawkins Hall.;
