History, heritage and memory in modern Jamaica

Jamaica is a land of old immigrants. Few modern Jamaicans can trace ancestral connections to the peoples who inhabited the island before the arrival of Columbus in 1494, and few can identify foreparents in the period of Spanish rule that lasted to 1655. Similarly, although the new peoples who have come to Jamaica over the last 200 years, — mostly Indians and Chinese— had a significant cultural impact, their numbers have been relatively modest

Rethinking the fall of the planter class

This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes, the difficulties faced by the planter class in the British West Indies from the 1780s onwards were an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. The American historian Lowell Ragatz published the first detailed historical account of their fall. His work helped to inform the influential arguments of Eric Williams, which were later challenged by Seymour Drescher. Recent research has begun to offer fresh perspectives on the debate about the decline of the planters, and this collection brings together articles taking a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social histor

Gluttony, excess, and the fall of the planter class in the British Caribbean

Food and rituals around eating are a fundamental part of human existence. They can also be heavily politicized and socially significant. In the British Caribbean, white slaveholders were renowned for their hospitality towards one another and towards white visitors. This was no simple quirk of local character. Hospitality and sociability played a crucial role in binding the white minority together. This solidarity helped a small number of whites to dominate and control the enslaved majority. By the end of the eighteenth century, British metropolitan observers had an entrenched opinion of Caribbean whites as gluttons. Travelers reported on the sumptuous meals and excessive drinking of the planter class. Abolitionists associated these features of local society with the corrupting influences of slavery. Excessive consumption and lack of self-control were seen as symptoms of white creole failure. This article explores how local cuisine and white creole eating rituals developed as part of slave societies and examines the ways in which ideas about hospitality and gluttony fed into the debates over slavery that led to the dismantling of slavery and the fall of the planter class

Lady Nugent’s second breakfast

Of the few personal journals that record details of West Indian everyday life during the period of slavery one of the best known is Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805.1 The journal’s author, Maria Nugent (1770–1834), journeyed to the island with her husband George, on his way to take up appointment as Governor of Jamaica, then one of the most important colonies of the British Empire and at the peak of its powers as a sugar producer. When the Nugents reached Jamaica in July 1801, Maria was just 30 years old and George, who had served in the British army’s colonial wars, was aged 44. They were unusual as a couple; few of the earlier governors of Jamaica arrived with wives, and while in the island Maria gave birth to two children, one in October 1802 and the other in September 1803. Although Maria became a ‘Lady’ only in 1811, six years after she left Jamaica, she has regularly been given the title for her time in the island

Jamaican coffee plantations, 1780-1860: a cartographic analysis

Large-scale slave plantations were the dominant producers during Jamaica's first coffee boom. The internal spatial organization and land use patterns of these plantations can be analysed cartometrically for the significant sample of plans surviving in the National Library ofJamaica. These patterns varied regionally and contrasted strongly with those found on sugar estates

Cookbooks and Caribbean cultural identity : an English-language hors d'oeuvre

Analysis of 119 English-language cookbooks (1890-1997) published in or having to do with the Caribbean. This study of the history of cookbooks indicates what it means to be Caribbean or to identify with some smaller territory or grouping and how this meaning has changed in response to social and political developments. Concludes that cookbook-writers have not been successful in creating a single account of the Caribbean past or a single, unitary definition of Caribbean cuisine or culture