Hauser,Mark W. (Author) and Florida museum of natural history (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2008
Published:
Gainesville: University Press of Florida
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
269 p., In 18th-century Jamaica, an informal, underground economy existed among enslaved laborers. Utilizes both documentary and archaeological evidence to reveal how slaves practiced their own systematic forms of economic production, exchange, and consumption. Hauser compares the findings from a number of previously excavated sites and presents new analyses that reinterpret these collections in the context of island-wide trading networks
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.
he author criticizes scholarship by Trevor Burnard and attempts to demonstrate the need to systematize a framework that captures the complexity of West Indian social structure and looks beyond the most visceral racial divide on the one hand or the merely local on the other. Burnard, in his recent book on Thomas Thistlewood, the eighteenth-century Jamaican overseer, pen-keeper, and slaveowning diarist, notes the spirit of egalitarianism that existed among Whites in Jamaica and the absence of class conflict among them, despite clear socioeconomic differences. The argument is clearly correct on a number of points, and not without significant merit and insight, Green argues. The fact that race trumped class in the White créole imagination and that recruitment to political office was of necessity inclusive of "lesser Whites" should not in any way provide an excuse for leaving those inequalities unexamined--especially when they formed a key constitutive element in the production of empire, she continues.;
