"C.L..R. James' 1938 seminal text, The Black Jacobins, and Eric Williams' 1944 tour de force, Capitalism and Slavery, constitute much more than foundational works in West Indian nationalist historiography. Both authors, born in colonial Trinidad and writing Caribbean history within its Atlantic context, made significant contributions to development discourse within the traditions of Enlightenment Idealism. As critical realists they considered popular historiography indispensable to any attempt to root philosophical ideals within recognizable terms of everyday living. In The Black Jacobins, James documents the struggles of the enslaved peoples of St. Dominique, the mercantile showpiece of French colonial capitalism in the West Indies for freedom and social justice. In addition, he details the transformation of this successful anti-slavery rebellion into something much more elaborate in terms of Atlantic history--the creation of Haiti, the Caribbean's first nation-state. In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams expands and develops the paradigm of African labor enslavement and European capital liberation, first outlined by James in The Black Jacobins, that became the basis of the revolutionary reorganization of productivity for European economic development." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
334 p, pt. I. Colonial and creole societies: Creolization and creole societies : a cultural nationalist view of Caribbean social history -- pt. II. Colonization and slavery: Colonization and slavery in Central America. Slave labour and the shaping of slave culture : the extraction of timber in the slave society of Belize. "Indios bravos" or "gentle savages" : 19th century views of the "Indians" of Belize and the Miskito Coast -- pt. III. From slavery to freedom: "Proto-proletarians"? : slave wages in the Americas : between slave labour and wage labour. Systems of domination after slavery : the control of land and labour in the British West Indies after 1838. The politics of freedom in the British Caribbean -- pt. IV. Class, culture, and politics: "The maze of politics" : the Caribbean Labour Congress and the Cold War, 1945-52. Race, class, and nation : social consciousness and political culture in four West Indian novels, 1949-55. Pluralism and the politicization of ethnicity in Belize and Guyana.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
333 p, Contents: Plantations, sugar cane, and slavery / Sidney M. Greenfield -- Indian labor and new world plantations : European demands and Indian responses in northeastern Brazil / Stuart B. Schwartz -- Slave families on a rural estate in colonial Brazil / Richard Graham -- African slave trade and economic development in Amazonia, 1700-1800 / Colin M. MacLachlan -- Encomienda, African slavery, and agriculture in seventeenth-century Caracas / Robert J. Ferry -- Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1790 / Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls -- Plantations, paternalism, and profitability : factors affecting African demography in the old British Empire / Daniel C. Littlefield -- Tale of two plantations : slave life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799-1828 / Richard S. Dunn -- Slaves and slave masters on eighteenth century St. John / Karen Fog Olwig -- Tousssaint Louverture and the slaves of the Bréda plantations / David Geggus -- Freedom and oppression of slaves in the eighteenth century Caribbean / Arthur L. Stinchcombe -- Was the plantation slave a proletarian? / Sidney W. Mintz
