Y Chromosome Lineages in Men of West African Descent

The early African experience in the Americas is marked by the transatlantic slave trade from ∼1619 to 1850 and the rise of the plantation system. The origins of enslaved Africans were largely dependent on European preferences as well as the availability of potential laborers within Africa. Rice production was a key industry of many colonial South Carolina low country plantations. Accordingly, rice plantations owners within South Carolina often requested enslaved Africans from the so-called “Grain Coast” of western Africa (Senegal to Sierra Leone). Studies on the African origins of the enslaved within other regions of the Americas have been limited. To address the issue of origins of people of African descent within the Americas and understand more about the genetic heterogeneity present within Africa and the African Diaspora, we typed Y chromosome specific markers in 1,319 men consisting of 508 west and central Africans (from 12 populations), 188 Caribbeans (from 2 islands), 532 African Americans (AAs from Washington, DC and Columbia, SC), and 91 European Americans. Principal component and admixture analyses provide support for significant Grain Coast ancestry among African American men in South Carolina. AA men from DC and the Caribbean showed a closer affinity to populations from the Bight of Biafra. Furthermore, 30–40% of the paternal lineages in African descent populations in the Americas are of European ancestry. Diverse west African ancestries and sex-biased gene flow from EAs has contributed greatly to the genetic heterogeneity of African populations throughout the Americas and has significant implications for gene mapping efforts in these populations

Servants of empire: The British training of domestics for Australia, 1926-31

Between 1926 and 1930 the Australian and British governments jointly funded a specialized centre at Market Harborough, England, to train women for domestic service. This centre was the first such institution specifically designed to prepare migrants for employment in a particular occupation in Australia. Although the number of graduates was not significant as a proportion of the domestic service workforce of Australia, and although the scheme was brought to a sudden end when the Depression stopped assisted migration generally, the experiment was important. It demonstrated that domestic servants could be drawn from a 'better type' if training could be applied to raising the status of the occupation. For the British and Australian governments this outcome satisfied a desire to use the assisted immigration of young women to increase the population of Australia and the empire, as well as underpinning a model of society in which bourgeois domesticity reigned

'Passengers only:' The extent and significance of absenteeism in eighteenth century Jamaica

Contemporaries and modern historians see absenteeism as a defining feature of British colonisation in the West Indies. Moreover, they have imbued absenteeism with a host of negative meanings, suggesting that it was the principal reason why West Indian colonies did not develop into settler societies as in British North America. Looking at Jamaica, this article examines the extent of absenteeism in the mid-eighteenth century and concludes that it was not as considerable as it has been presented in the literature. In addition, it assesses the long-term significance of the phenomenon and questions whether absenteeism was especially socially and politically deleterious