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in the restless and adventurous coastal wanderings of the Caribbean fisherman, sailor or sea-port smuggler. They can be found inland in the island-wandering woodcutter; those who squat on Government land; the urban dame school-teacher; or more recently, the innovative doctor, the mountainside ganja grower and in the financial services sector. I suggest also that the relevance of frontier study to the
of Mayreau, the Snagg family of Canouan, and, in the twentieth century, the Eustace family of Mustique and the Tobago Cays. They operated simple social systems that tied the populations, of no more than a few hundred on each populated island, to the land through sharecropping, keeping of animals and fishing. In the twentieth century a small proportion of the men, many of whom were good sailors, obtained half-yearly employment
(embodying the ‘wild’: nature, chaos and that which needed to be tamed); the planters’ and intellectuals’ fear of the land returning to bush; and, in contrast, a growing lyricism in response to the beauty of the environment in its wild state. At a practical level, the colonial authorities in St Vincent were anxious to improve the society and protect it from contamination by wild
practices constituted a nightmare for both colonial and postcolonial governments. The slow death of the St Vincent sugar industry during the nineteenth century created conditions so desperate for the mass of the rural workforce that by the end of the century, State acquisition of land for small farmers was officially recommended. This process was begun in 1899. However, the beginnings of land settlement brought to
politics of Indigenous resurgence is grounded in an ethic of reciprocal responsibility not only in relation to other human beings, but also in relation to the land. The mode of domination characteristic of settler colonialism, he argues, has not been that of exploitation and proletarianisation but rather of the dispossession of Indigenous land and the transformation of land into alienable property to be used instrumentally for economic production. Not only did colonial dispossession wrest away from Indigenous peoples the material conditions for their economic self
family caravan on the land she owned. The local authorities refused the permit. The statistics presented in the case showed that whilst 80 per cent of non-Roma applicants got permits to build their houses on their land, only 20 per cent of Romani applicants were allowed to place caravans on their land. As Clements ( 2001 ) argued, the case was not primarily about the special rights of a specific Romani group, but about the right not to be discriminated against under supposedly neutral laws that do not take the special position of Romani minorities into account
religious structures, from the late fourteenth century, shaped its migration history in many ways (Sugar 1977 ; Hoare 2007 ; Wachtel 2008 ). Authorities directly settled Anatolian Turkish cavalrymen on conquered land as ‘timariots’ who taxed local peasants and raised troops, while Ottoman trade-routes developed towns like Sarajevo and Thessaloniki into provincial capitals, refuges for many Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The Ottoman politics of conversion to Islam, necessary for South Slavs and other Catholic/Orthodox Christians seeking bureaucratic
’ and, on Jamaica’s lamentable public institutions, Trollope noted ‘of [their] public honesty – I will say nothing … but the Jamaicans speak of it in terms which are not flattering to their own land’ (Trollope, 1859 : 121). One reason for increasing British suspicion was the worsening relationship between absentee landowners and their colonial dependants. Although this suspicion can be traced as far back
recognition approach. Crucial amongst these are his analyses of ‘need’, ‘dependency’, ‘vicious circles’, and colonising social logics, which I explore below. In a crucial passage at the beginning of Part II of The Second Discourse , Rousseau wrote, The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying ‘This is mine’ and
‘the affecting reflections of Humboldt, – that as we pass from one hemisphere to another, we feel an indescribable sensation in beholding those constellations which we have known in youth, progressively sink, & finally disappear’ (McDonald, 2001 : 59). But once on land he sees just how wild nature can be: it is, from his perspective, rampant, untamed and untameable because ultimately beyond