African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
306 p., Weather-induced environmental crises and slow responses from imperial authorities, Johnson argues, played an inextricable and, until now, largely unacknowledged role in the rise of revolutionary sentiments in the 18th century Caribbean.
261 p., Italian painter Agostino Brunias first traveled to the Caribbean sometime around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, First Baronet, a British aristocrat who had been charged with overseeing the sale of lands in the islands won by Britain from France at the end of the Seven Years War. Working primarily on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, as Young's official painter, Brunias was ostensibly charged with documenting the exotic bounty and diversity of the islands. For roughly the next quarter century, he painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite, creating romanticized tableaux that featured Caribbeans of color--so called "Red" and "Black" Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. Examines how the artist's images reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by Britons in the colonial Caribbean during the late 18th century.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
217 p., In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Recounts the lives of enslaved women in 18th century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p, In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
296 p., The formal evolution of colonial prose narrative, Ianinni argues, was contingent upon the emergence of natural history writing, which itself emerged necessarily from within the context of Atlantic slavery and the production of tropical commodities. As he reestablishes the history of cultural exchange between the Caribbean and North America, Ianinni recovers the importance of the West Indies in the formation of American literary and intellectual culture as well as its place in assessing the moral implications of colonial slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
189 p., Traces the shape of historical thought among peoples who had previously been denied any history at all. The top half of each page presents a direct transcript of oral histories told by living Saramakas about their eighteenth-century ancestors, "Maroons" who had escaped slavery and settled in the rain forests of Suriname. Below these transcripts, Richard Price provides commentaries placing the Saramaka accounts into broader social, intellectual, and historical contexts.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
208 p., Illustrates the way enslaved Africans lived and helped to shape Jamaican society in the three decades before British abolition of the slave trade. Audra Diptee's in-depth investigations reveal unexpected insights into the demographics of those captured in Africa and legally transported on British slave ships.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
180 p., Brings together, in one volume, a number of monographs from the mid to late 18th century (the period known as the Age of Reason) on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of African and Creole slaves in the English-speaking Caribbean. Included here are James Grainger’s Essay on the More Common West-Indian Diseases (1764) and book 4 of The Sugar-Cane (1764); book 2 of the Reverend Griffith Hughes’s Natural History of the Island
of Barbados (1750); and Benjamin Moseley’s Miscellaneous Medical Observations (1789).
