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‘devices’: ‘Sex’; writing a narrative around ‘an English or American character’ in a Caribbean setting; and ‘Race’. His horror at being categorised as the ‘West Indian’ author of Guerillas might be related to the fact that it does have these stock narrative motors of the popular fiction he so despises, including a ‘quick-to-strip’ female protagonist. While anathematising all of these mechanisms, Naipaul
When we think about the factors that have contributed to the beginnings of a West Indian British intellectual tradition, we would commonly bring to mind the towering figure of C. L. R. James and his comrades of the pre- Windrush generation, such as George Padmore. It would also be important to acknowledge the generation of nationalist writers and thinkers based in the Caribbean itself, such
understanding the visceral meaning of the systemic violence that was exerted against African people. That violence happened first in Africa as they were loaded onto slave ships – James Stanfield in a poem on ‘the Guinea Trade’ described them as part of a business that was a ‘vast machine’ that while ‘assum[ing] the honours of a honest trade … had, beneath a prostituted glare [a] poison’d purpose’.5 It continued in the Americas, where Africans were transformed into slaves and were worked relentlessly, especially on sugar plantations, where conditions were harsh – Caribbean
In the century following 1850 the West Indies produced a steady flow of West Indian intellectuals, predominantly men, who either spent short spells of time in Europe and North America or who lived outside the Caribbean for a good part of their lives. A significant early figure was Edward W. Blyden; 1 in the twentieth century there were Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Eric
could be accused of the crime of piracy. Privateering and piracy research has often focused on Caribbean buccaneers as freebooters, yet maritime raiding could be highly organized and expansive in this period. The Uskoks developed ‘raiding economies’ that altered commercial patterns in the Adriatic Sea in the sixteenth century.64 Meanwhile, maritime raiding became pervasive in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, East China Sea, and the Sea of Japan. Adam Clulow demonstrates that the Japanese port of ‘Hirado was at the centre of a great wave of Sino-Japanese piracy’ in
settlers were generally more likely to go to war with indigenous peoples than with Spanish colonials. Even in the eighteenth century, when war between European powers increasingly spread across the Atlantic, Spanish America was far less exposed to the destructive effects of war than the British and French colonies in North America and the Caribbean. Concentrated mainly in the continental interiors of North and South America, most of Spanish America’s peoples were safely insulated from the effects of external attack, thanks to the protections of geography and the
represented America in so many different ways. US international expansion was not limited to the Caribbean and Pacific territories obtained in the Spanish–American War. In fact, the US population was ambivalent over the benefit of colonial occupation, as was the government, and most territories were released to their own management shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War.48 Despite the decline in US colonial presence, the US influence continued to spread through charitable aid and benevolence organisations. Ian Tyrrell suggests this was a distinctly American
research fund formed part of the Colonial Office response to the crisis that affected the Colonial Empire in the late 1930s, of which riots in the Caribbean were only a part. Research became a priority at a point at which Britain needed a meaningful gesture to ward off domestic and international criticism of the management of its colonies. Scientific research was described as a practical tool that would provide the basic information that underpinned development and so would serve to guarantee the efficacy of Colonial Office interventions in the future
Union and EFTA (and about a dozen other, less far-reaching trade arrangements in different parts of the world), would now have to be added the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) involving Canada, Mexico and the United States. In addition, a whole series of more extensive regional free-trade agreements were concluded: in Latin America (Mercosur, the Andean Pact, the Central American Common Market, the Caribbean Community and Common Market), in SouthEast Asia (Asian Free Trade Association) and in the Pacific rim including the United States and Canada (Asia
transformation in missionary activity signalled first in the Caribbean and then in India has to be linked to the transition from the first to the second British empires at the end of the eighteenth century. 61 During this period the emphasis of colonial policy turned from securing British settlement to the governance of indigenous populations. When John Wesley and George Whitfield established evangelical missions in America it was to help