Alcohol was familiar to newly arrived Africans enslaved in the British and French Caribbean, and the spiritual meanings enslaved persons attached to drinking reflect the continuity of African cultural beliefs. Despite occasional efforts by colonial officials to restrict drinking by enslaved persons, they had easy access to rum and other alcoholic beverages. The ready availability of alcohol sparked the creation of new African-oriented drinking practices, which, at the level of the lowest common denominator, combined the social and sacred alcohol-based traditions of diverse African ethnic groups. As in Africa, alcohol helped foster spirituality and promote group identity among enslaved persons. The construction of new drinking styles also strengthened resistance ideologies, which challenged European efforts to suppress African-oriented customs. Understanding alcohol use by enslaved persons provides a prism through which to view underlying principles that helped shape the life of enslaved persons, and highlights the way Africans in their homeland and the diaspora maintained cultural links across the Atlantic. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
Since its publication in 1976, Ivan van Sertima's book They Came Before Columbus has gone through 21 printings, while receiving widespread--though not unanimous--condemnation from the American archaeological establishment, culminating in a hostile, full-length forum in Current Anthropology. And yet, startlingly, the field of American archaeology has recently found itself in the midst of a major paradigm shift, caused by archaeological evidence that obliterates the Clovis model as a legitimate demarcation of the first presence of human settlement in the New World. Kamugisha proposes to trace the response to They Came Before Columbus, while discussing the issue of diffusionism in van Sertima's work.;
Glen reviews "The History of Early Methodism in Antigua: A Critique of Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood's Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Carribean to 1830 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998).;
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.;
Internal, indentured and regional migration were tightly interlinked in post-emancipation Martinique by both contemporary perceptions and migrant actions. Anticipating a flight from the estates, colonial elites were committed before emancipation to constructing a replacement workforce through immigration. Indentureship was therefore a reaction to a crisis of labour relations rather than of labour supply. Such schemes also stimulated regional movements, from marronage by indentured Africans and Asians to recruitment efforts in the British West Indies. Viewed together, the three faces of post-emancipation migration reveal the continuing tension between the colony's search for coerced labour and the migrants' assertions of agency. [abstract];
Based on the correspondence and diaries of three slaveholders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this article identifies the differences in the attitudes and behaviour of each planter towards his slaves in response to structural constraints or norms. These include political, administrative, civic and religious institutions, but also the economic system, social expectations and cultural norms. The author concludes that, although one can detect degrees of harshness in the treatment of field labourers, sexual exploitation seems constant and intractable in all three cases. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
