Studies of political change on Grenada have invariably centred on the activities of T. Albert Marryshow in the period immediately after World War I. Drawing on the rich data available from contemporary newspapers, this paper argues that Donovan's efforts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided the impetus and framework for Marryshow's later struggles. In fact, Marryshow himself admits Donovan's contributions to his political growth. The "first of the Federalists", Donovan preached federation long before the concept was fashionable. Embracing a broad approach to the island's situation, both activists linked local demands for change to the plight of Africans worldwide. [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];
Freemasonry has been an important sociocultural institution in the Caribbean since the early eighteenth century, but to date there has been little scholarship on the movement in the region. This article, based on primary Masonic documentation, is a case study of Freemasonry in Barbados between 1880 and 1914. During this period Freemasonry was torn between its idealized notions of brotherhood and the discriminatory practices based on race, class and gender imbedded in colonial relations. Efforts by Barbadian whites to exclude blacks from English Freemasonry were thwarted by London-based Masonic officials. Indeed, the commitment of British Freemasonry to a policy of racial inclusiveness convinced middle-class black Barbadians of British "fair play". [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
As anonymously as Anton de Kom began his life in 1898 in a small nineteenth-century Surinam village, it would be terminated forty-seven years later by forces beyond his control. His death, however, was not a singular event, but one representative of an entire generation of Surinamese migrants who, desiring to improve their lives, travelled northward to Holland, the "mother country", only to find a deeper sense of pain as unwanted and abused eacute;migrés. De Kom's migration to Holland occurred twice. First, as a youth he was pulled northward to understand better "her greatness". A decade later, he was forcibly pushed and exiled northward by the Dutch colonial authorities. On the second occasion, he became aware of his own illegitimate political birth as a colonial subject, and the psychological trap that awaited him when asked to defend the imperial country against an invading German army. His residence in exile exposed the serious dilemma of "two-ness", described by W.E.B. DuBois, when the colonized becomes psychologically and aesthetically committed to the colonizer's world, as well as that of the colonized. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT];
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];
