Barry Higman

Jamaica surveyed : plantation maps and plans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Jamaica Surveyed was first published in Jamaica in 1988 and was not widely available to a worldwide market. This new reprint is now available and brings to the public a representative sample of the enormous collection of plantation maps and plans in the National Library of Jamaica. The complete collection, unique in the Caribbean, provides information on over twenty thousand landholdings in Jamaica and is one of the most extensive collections of plantation maps in the Americas. Jamaica Surveyed explores the diversity of agricultural activities in the island and the changing patterns of land use during the period. The familiar sugar estates are included but so are the coffee and pimento plantations and livestock pens. Plantation villages, gardens, grounds and great houses are featured, as well as post-emancipation settlement patterns. What emerges is a fascinating picture of Jamaica as it was in the first phase of large-scale settlement and as it changed over time in response to economic forces. B. W. Higman combines cartographic and documentary evidence to produce an unusual work of historical scholarship of interest to historians, geographers, cartographers, and all students of Caribbean life and culture.

Domestic service in Australia

This ground-breaking work is the first comprehensive account of the lives of domestic servants in Australia. It shows the significance of domestic service for Australias society and economy, from 1788 to the present day. For many years, domestic service was the most important form of paid employment for Australian women. European Australia has often seen domestic service as a civilizing force. It made possible a cultured life for the leisured classes, and promoted middleclass ideals of domesticity and fertility. The house was the architectural stage for the domestic theatre of social confrontation and accommodation. Barry Higman explores demography, technological changes, urbanisation and industrialisation, wealth inequalities, the economic role of women, household structure, childcare, the dual-career family, immigration policy, community organisation and much more in this major new book.

Household structure and fertility on Jamaican slave plantations: a nineteenth-century example.

Abstract It is generally agreed that the marital instability and casual mating characteristic of West Indian family structure depress fertility. These conditions are traced to the mating organization of the slaves. The stresses placed on the Mrican family systems of the slaves are obvious: the continued importation of slaves, most of them young adult males; the ruthless separation of kin through sale or removal; the overwhelming authority of the master, reducing the dependence of children on their parents and the economic role of the male household head. Yet, in spite of these stresses, there is evidence of strong bonds of kinship and sense of family among the slaves.

Survival and Silence in the Material Record of Slavery and Abolition

The colonial slave populations of the British Caribbean constitute an essentially arbitrary sample. This has many advantages for historical study, as well as some hazards. The islands and the associated mainland territories which happened to become and remain British colonies represent a substantial slice of the Caribbean region’s physical variety. Some of these territories were British (English) colonies, as slave societies for 200 years down to the abolition of slavery in 1838. Some of them passed through a series of European imperial hands, while others, notably Barbados, were British from the day of their colonial creation. A few became part of the Empire only at the very end of the system, around the time of the abolition of the British Atlantic slave trade in 1807. Several of the colonial units were themselves archipelagos, providing opportunities for comparison at a micro-level. In spite of this diversity, the British Caribbean remains an imperial unit of measure, marked by a consistency of metropolitan government, and a consistency of archival record that would not otherwise exist. An important consequence of the growing desire for systematic and uniform record-keeping is that the relative economic prosperity of the planter class of Jamaica and Barbados, in particular, underpinned the creation and survival of a bureaucratic paper record which ensured that even the less significant non-sugar plantation islands – such as Anguilla and the Bahamas – would have the details of their enslaved people recorded within the same system. At least potentially, all of these numerous colonial units can be studied comparatively. How far has this comparative potential been fulfilled and what factors conspire against its success in terms of the study of material culture? What was ‘British’ about the material culture of slavery and abolition in the British Caribbean? Is it important to look for unifying elements in the material culture of the colonies Slavery & Abolition, 2014 Vol. 35, No. 3, 527–535, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2014.944036

Slaveholders in Jamaica: Colonial Society and Culture during the Era of Abolition

Emmer’s position and only in the very last paragraph does Emmer come back into play. The author subtly argues that Emmer’s ‘excellent work as a historian would have had a wider acclaim beyond his scholarly and social peer groups’ had he shown ‘some sensitivity and empathy with regard to issues of existential significance to specific communities’ that he writes about (327). I do not expect retirement to dull Emmer’s pen, so more debates in Dutch and international journals will undoubtedly follow in the future.

A HISTORY OF ISLANDS

The Caribbean is named for its sea but the islands define the region and make its history. As a marine environment, the Caribbean Sea is a creation of the land that encloses it, with an unbroken continental coastline to the south and west, and a permeable but continuous arc of islands facing the Atlantic Ocean. Without the islands there would be no sea. The water would be nothing more than another stretch in the fluid maritime history of the ocean. Equally significant, the islands of the Caribbean surround and demarcate the Sea rather than sitting in it. This geographical formation determined fundamental features in the development of the Caribbean and distinguished the experience of the region from that of other island histories around the world. Islands can be scattered in many different kinds of patterns. Sometimes they stand alone, in splendid isolation, but often they occur in groups or clusters. The tropical Atlantic from the Caribbean to the coast of Africa is almost empty of islands. In this vast oceanic zone, islands are small, few in number, and extremely isolated. The islands of the Caribbean, by contrast, are numerous and vary greatly in size (Map 1.1). What determines the uniqueness of the Caribbean islands as a whole is the way they form an archipelago, spread through an extensive arc with large bodies of water to each side, and the way the archipelago floats free of the mainland. The Caribbean Sea, like the Atlantic, is largely empty of islands.

PLANTATION PEOPLES, 1630–1770

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European colonization had reduced the Caribbean islands to a blank canvas. In truth it was not so much a blank canvas as one that had been thickly painted by a series of hands, scoured and scraped, then smeared with a rough bloody cloth, and cleaned again of yet another attempted landscape. The people and the civilizations that had flourished in the Greater Antilles before Columbus had been virtually obliterated. They had not been replaced by any new substantial population or any new form of civilization. Even regions the Spanish had attempted to populate were being evacuated. The land that had been brought to a high state of cultivation by the Tainos was being reconquered by rainforest. Exotic trees made themselves at home in the woodland. Large feral animals introduced by the Spanish crashed through the undergrowth of this landscape, otherwise silent but for the night sounds of crickets and frogs, the occasional noisy cascade or crack of thunder. Only in the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean, which the Spanish had touched less heavily, did the indigenous people survive in significant numbers. Although new European peoples had begun to show an interest in exploiting the opportunities offered by the disorganized state of Spains Caribbean empire and although some of these same nations had encouraged attempts at settlement in the 1620s, there were few clues to the revolutionary transformation that was about to occur.

Testing the Boundaries of White Australia: Domestic Servants and Immigration Policy, 1901-45

In the period 1901–45 Australian governments sought to increase the nations domestic service workforce through immigration while confining that immigration to British sources. Implementation of the White Australia policy resulted in an active deportation of household workers, particularly in the tropical north. In spite of broad acceptance of race‐based immigration restrictions as a national ideal, calls came from the tropical and pastoral margins for a relaxation specific to domestic service in order to encourage white women to settle in remote areas. Proponents of non‐British immigration argued that such servants would enable the long‐term achievement of White Australia but they met firm resistance.

Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834

Reprint of work that originally appeared in 1984 (see HLAS 48:2517b). Excellent and thorough treatment of major demographic aspects of British Caribbean slavery from abolition of slave trade to slave emancipation. Draws heavily on extensive data available from slave registration returns for various

Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica 1807-1834.

First published in 1976 (see HLAS 40:2983), work is a masterful analysis of the dynamics of slave labor in the economic growth of early-19th-century Jamaica. Discusses various characteristics of slave and free-colored population including mortality, birth rates, manumission, distribution, and structure, as well as jobs performed on island as a who