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The Caribbean Post's treatment of West Indian femininity reflected the growing significance of the beauty contest in the British Caribbean. Phyllis Woolford, 'Miss British Caribbean' of 1948 was pictured on the cover of the Post, epitomising modern Caribbean womanhood. This book examines the links between beauty and politics in the Anglophone Caribbean, providing a cultural history of Caribbean beauty competitions. It discusses the earliest Caribbean beauty competition, 'Miss Jamaica', launched in 1929 on the cusp of Jamaican cultural blossoming, and explores the emerging radical feminist voices amidst the cultural revolution. The 'Miss Trinidad' beauty competition, started in 1946, doubled as the search for an annual 'Carnival Queen', and represented the power of the moneyed white elite against an emergent black political force. The image that emerges of Barbados's 'Carnival Queen' contest is of a decidedly bourgeois contest, in which the 'creme de la creme' of Marcus Jordan's account were the most esteemed 'young ladies' of middle-class society. It examines the institutionalisation of the 'Ten Types' model and provides examples of copycat competitions elsewhere in the Caribbean. The 'Ten Types - Miss Ebony' contest was championed as a lesson in Jamaican racial democracy for other, less advanced, West Indian audiences. The book highlights the radical vantage point of exiled Trinidadian-born communist-feminist Claudia Jones who launched a Caribbean beauty competition in London. The burgeoning black beauty culture of London was imagined, through the West Indian Gazette as a pragmatic means of acquiring the respectable appearance that was 'race-pride' work.
At a Conference of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) held at the University of Kent in 1969, C. L. R. James spoke with typical energy of his experience of growing up in Trinidad. I didn’t get literature from the mango-tree, or bathing on the shore and getting the sun of the colonial countries
In his capacity as a roaming police advisor, Arthur Mavrogordato inspected the St Lucia Police in 1948. An experienced colonial policeman, Mavrogordato had headed up the Palestine Police from 1923 until 1931. He was no stranger to the police forces of the Caribbean. He had paid an earlier visit to St Lucia in 1937 as an official police advisor in a mould similar to Dowbiggin’s. At that
Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean draws together essays and arguments from a diverse group of contributors who seek to explore the many and varied ways in which Ireland and the Caribbean share an interlocking Atlantic history. This shared history is not always a comfortable one. Despite being victims of the first English empire, Irish people enslaved others throughout this period, and can be found at the cutting edge of extractive colonialism. They profited, exploited, traded, and trafficked with the very worst of European opportunists. Irish merchants and enslavers operated in the grey zone between empires. They could be found trading within the Danish, French and Dutch empires, as well as within the British empire, with which they were more properly connected. Irish people also shared an experience of colonialism themselves, and this opens a series of interesting avenues and rich ironies for the contributors to untangle and interrogate. The Caribbean had an outsized impact on Ireland itself, as many of the chapters argue. Irish estates were modelled or named for Caribbean precursors, just as the colonial engineering of the Irish landscapes affected those in Jamaica, Trinidad and elsewhere. The relationship was reciprocal and complex. This collection builds on the sterling work of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project at University College London, as well as the pioneering scholarship of Nini Rodgers. It brings together literary scholars, architectural historians, historians of colonialism, and art historians. The result is a novel exploration of the deep and complex relationship between two island archipelagos in a period of peak colonialism.
approach to development with some long-standing laissez-faire principles. Two wider political issues made Colonial Office attempts to persuade the Caribbean colonies to follow its preferred routes to industrialisation difficult, however. The increasing political autonomy of governments in the Caribbean region meant that Britain could not merely instruct its West Indian possessions to follow its edicts. In addition, it became clear that in the post-war world, the US hoped to shape development across the Caribbean along lines that it found conducive to its own interests
The expansion of Scottish involvement in politics in the Caribbean mirrored the Scots’ increasingly prominent position in the imperial polity in London. Significantly, as the number of Scots acquiring political influence with the national government increased, so too did the opportunities for political advancement in the islands. Moreover, as well as providing access to
This book is wholly devoted to assessing the array of links between Scotland and the Caribbean in the later eighteenth century. It uses a wide range of archival sources to paint a detailed picture of the lives of thousands of Scots who sought fortunes and opportunities, as Burns wrote, ‘across th' Atlantic roar’. The book outlines the range of their occupations as planters, merchants, slave owners, doctors, overseers and politicians, and shows how Caribbean connections affected Scottish society during the period of ‘improvement’. The book highlights the Scots' reinvention of the system of clanship to structure their social relations in the empire and finds that involvement in the Caribbean also bound Scots and English together in a shared Atlantic imperial enterprise and played a key role in the emergence of the British nation and the Atlantic world.
greatly want more ships of war here’, wrote John Byrn, and ‘[I] am surprised the government neglect so valuable an island as this of Jamaica’. 20 John Byrn, Irish merchant of Kingston There was a small Irish presence in Kingston’s merchant community, unlike Bridgetown, Barbados, and elsewhere in the eastern Caribbean. In the middle years of the century
Cato Street and the Caribbean 81 5 Cato Street and the Caribbean Ryan Hanley The historiography of protest and radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain sometimes seems most clearly divided on questions of geography. On the one hand, a long-standing tradition emphasises the significance of internal, often localised motivating and organisational factors in the sudden outbreaks of violent resistance that seem to characterise the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political topography of the British Isles.1 Most modern working-class and labour