The Virgin Islands in the course of centuries have witnessed the coming and going of Ciboney, Arawak and Carib peoples, European discovery by Christopher Columbus, temporary occupation by pirates and adventurers, colonization, commercial and plantation development by Danes and other North European settlers, African slavery and its abolition, American purchase, colonial government, social and political change, and in recent years remarkable tourist and industrial developments.

These and other topics have been narrated and interpreted by Dr. Isaac Dookhan in this first comprehensive history of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Dr. Dookhan is eminently well qualified for this undertaking. He was born in the British colony of British Guiana, now independent Guyana, where he was educated in the public schools and served as teacher and headmaster. The author has drawn upon primary and secondary sources in recounting the experience of the Virgin Islands and their peoples. He is concerned with successive waves of immigrants, how they affected the physical environment and cultural life of the islands, the impact of international wars and politics, commodity price movements, and technological changes.

Walter Rodney was
an exceptional scholar-activist who not only interpreted the consequences of
centuries of transatlantic slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism but also
engaged in the struggles to change their racial, social and economic legacies.
As these legacies persist into the twenty-first century, his life and writings
remain profoundly relevant.

He contributed to
a distinctive intellectual blend of Black Power and Marxism, that had mass
support in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s in the Caribbean and Africa. He
had a capacity for listening to people which drew Rastafari youth activists and
others to his groundings. When the Jamaican government banned him from
returning to work at the University of the West Indies in October 1968, there was
a mass upheaval, and these demonstrations stimulated the Black Power and
socialist movements throughout the Caribbean. His most productive years were at
the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, where he taught development
studies and wrote his seminal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. A
profound scholar of the history of the working people of his native Guyana, he
embraced the democratic struggles of Africans and Indians. His radical activism
and mass appeal as a leader of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana led
President Forbes Burnham to have him assassinated.

The book is an attempt to show that,
contrary to general belief, free villages were established in Barbados soon
after the end of the Apprenticeship in 1838. The term free villages is employed in the way that it was coined by
its author, William Knibb, Baptist missionary in Jamaica. He said in November
1838 that such villages were to be the blacks' routes of escape from their
inveterate enemies; the emancipated black man could use the village as an asylum from which he
could defy them with scorn, and go to any estate he pleases to work.
Therefore, the fact that as many as 69 such settlements could be found within
thirty years in small, densely populated Barbados suggests that the scenario
which was being played out in less densely populated territories was not absent
from Barbados. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that every opportunity was
being exploited by blacks to acquire land that they could control and therefore
escape the restrictions of conditional tenancy on planters' lands.

However, free village development in
Barbados can be seen as a variant. Unlike elsewhere in the Caribbean, free
villages could not be equated with the emergence of a small farmer class of
significant size. In Barbados, the average size of holding was less than one
acre, which meant that the vast majority of the villagers had to find regular
employment as agricultural labourers on the plantations. Therefore, by 1945,
while free villages housed a majority of the rural population, that population
was forced to remain close to the plantation, not merely because of the size of
the island, but because the plantations were the main source of employment. In
this way, free village development in the island did not adversely affect
labour supplies on the plantations.

Tennyson Joseph provides
a comprehensive analysis of the relevance of C.L.R. James's political thought
to twenty-first-century Caribbean politics. He clarifies, explains and
justifies James's method, and applies his ideas to concrete political developments
occurring in the twenty-first century Caribbean in its interconnection with the
rest of the world. The work offers a unique treatment of James in three
distinctive ways: firstly, in its scope and specific focus on the application
of the thought of James to the post-Soviet Union, post-Cold War era of
Caribbean politics; secondly concerning discussing the possibilities for
radical, anti-systemic possibilities in the Caribbean in the early twenty-first
century; and thirdly, in the employment of James's thought and method as an
explanatory tool for understanding those contemporary issues. The book
brings the ideas of C.L.R. James to a new generation of Caribbean and global
readers and is a useful resource to all students, teachers, and activists
interested in Caribbean politics, political ideas, and radical political
theory.

Children are not empty canvases
awaiting adult input; rather, they come into the world with inherent traits
encoded in their DNA. As they develop, these unique characteristics gradually
reveal themselves. In A Child at a Time: Understanding Temperament, Loraine D. Cook explains
the importance of teachers and parents understanding a child's unique
characteristics (their temperament), reflected in their behaviour and reaction
styles. The author questions the conventional one-size-fits-all approach to
education to which many educators and parents adhere. By exploring the concepts
of a poorness-of-fit and a goodness-of-fit environment, Cook illustrates how a
child's surroundings can influence the expression of their temperament.

Over several
chapters, the author discusses parents'
and teachers' interactions with their children and how such interactions can
affect the quality of the home and school environments in which children
develop. These interactions are not only impacted by children's temperaments
but also by the characteristics of the adults involved. If adults fail to account for temperament in managing children's
behaviours, then the nurturing environment for children in the home and the
classroom may be inundated with frustrated parents, teachers and children, potentially
compromising children's social, emotional and academic growth. By helping
parents and teachers understand children's behavioural patterns, adults can
develop a more holistic environment conducive to their children's well-being.

In the book's concluding chapters,
Cook discusses the INSIGHTS programme, which is rooted in temperament theories,
and its outcomes in Jamaica. This programme offers customized behaviour-management
strategies for parents and teachers based on children's temperaments and
emphasizes early intervention by teaching conflict-management skills to
children as young as five.

A Child at a Time is
a call to educators,
parents and policymakers to recognize that children's individual differences are
important, particularly in their formative years. By reading this book, parents
and educators can gain valuable insights into children's behaviours and reactions,
thereby improving their approach to behaviour management.

A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit offers a rare and penetrative
exploration into Caribbean literary articulations of non-material and numinous
presences. The study incorporates representations of African-Caribbean and Indigenous
mythologies, syncretic spirituality, and magico-religious practices. From texts
by ten writers, Hannah Regis extracts thematic and poetic references to
Caribbean spectrality, its formal properties, and signifying practices to probe
the nature and fictional representations of historical futures. Regis
links the haunting spectrality of the Middle Passage
with the lingering trauma and violence of the plantation order. She then raises
the issue of how the latter has impacted complex ontological schema and
considers how literary engagement with spirits operates as therapeutic
interventions to psychic maladies, and as a potential model for a Caribbean
aesthetic. This book also boldly re-conceptualizes ontological and
epistemological approaches to contest
colonial and neocolonial hegemonic ways of being. It provides a comprehensive
taxonomy of Caribbean creative and intellectual practices, and theories for
effectively categorizing and explaining the emergence and workings of spirit
presences. Regis combines diverse theoretical perspectives from a range of
scholars working within the traditions of postmemory, cultural memory,
spirituality and Caribbean philosophy to formulate a crucial counter-archival
history through which the voices of the oppressed find articulation and
belonging while indexing a repository of cultural, psychological and affective
expressions that are linked to the unfinished business of history. The writer
adroitly contends that a Caribbean poetics of spirit sits at the edge of a new
wave of literary criticism.

Perspectives on Caribbean Law
celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Faculty of Law at the University of
the West Indies with an expertly curated anthology, featuring twelve insightful
chapters that explore the broad scope of legal scholarship in the Caribbean.
Authored by a mix of emerging and established academics who have been part of
MonaLaw at various stages of its evolution, these essays provide a
comprehensive view of national, regional and international challenges,
contributing significantly to the academic discourse surrounding Caribbean law.

This
peer-reviewed collection delves into a diverse range of topics such as
corporate law, tort law, international law, family law and ethics.
Specifically, it explores fundamental Caribbean legal issues, including:
CARICOM, the use of Creole in the justice system, tourism liability, sports
fairness and aspects of corporate governance, such as directors' duties. It
further explores defamation, child law on medical consent, the Caribbean
appellate court system, jurisdictional challenges concerning the Shiprider
Agreement and ethics in the legal profession.

Not
only does this anthology honour the legacy of the Faculty of Law, particularly
on the Mona campus, but it also serves as an essential contribution to
Caribbean legal scholarship by advancing the region's understanding and
development of law. Thus, Perspectives on
Caribbean Law is a crucial resource for libraries and everyone involved in
Commonwealth Caribbean law and legal education.

In Don
Dada: Assessing
the Socio-economic and Political Power of Jamaica's Mafia Bosses, Damion Blake takes on a
controversial subject: the Jamaican don.

The Jamaican don is a non-state actor,
a male figure, usually from the community in which he plays a leadership role,
and who wields considerable power and control inside that nation's garrison
communities. Garrisons in Jamaica are poor inner city communities characterized
by homogeneous voting patterns for one of Jamaica's two major political
parties: the People's National Party and the Jamaica Labour Party.

With revelatory insight, Don Dada explores the
major roles dons play in their communities and how the activities of these
non-state criminal actors have influenced the governance process. Focussing on communities
in the downtown metropolitan area of Kingston, the capital city, the book
investigates the evolution of the don from the 1960s to the present and their
roles of security/protection, social welfare, partisan mobilization, and law
and order. Blake contends that dons have
emerged as embedded governing authorities in Jamaican garrisons based on the
socio-economic and political roles they carry out and puts forward a
peace-building model to dissolve the power of dons and their gangs in Jamaica's
marginal communities.

Since the mid-nineteenth-century abolition of slavery, the call for reparations for the crime of African enslavement and native genocide has been growing. In the Caribbean, grassroots and official voices now constitute a regional reparations movement. While it remains a fractured, contentious and divisive call, it generates considerable public interest, especially within sections of the community that are concerned with issues of social justice, equity, civil and human rights, education, and cultural identity. The reparations discourse has been shaped by the voices from these fields as they seek to build a future upon the settlement of historical crimes.

This is the first scholarly work that looks comprehensively at the reparations discussion in the Caribbean. Written by a leading economic historian of the region, a seasoned activist in the wider movement for social justice and advocacy of historical truth, Britain's Black Debt looks at the origins and development of reparations as a regional and international process. Weaving detailed historical data on Caribbean slavery and the transatlantic slave trade together with legal principles and the politics of postcolonialism, Beckles sets out a solid academic analysis of the evidence. He concludes that Britain has a case of reparations to answer which the Caribbean should litigate.

International law provides that chattel slavery as practised by Britain was a crime against humanity. Slavery was invested in by the royal family, the government, the established church, most elite families, and large public institutions in the private and public sector. Citing the legal principles of unjust and criminal enrichment, the author presents a compelling argument for Britain's payment of its black debt, a debt that it continues to deny in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

It is at once an exciting narration of Britain's dominance of the slave markets that enriched the economy and a seminal conceptual journey into the hidden politics and public posturing of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic. No work of this kind has ever been attempted. No author has had the diversity of historical research skills, national and international political involvement, and personal engagement as an activist to present such a complex yet accessible work of scholarship.

Honouring
the remarkable career of Professor Hubert Devonish, a leading scholar in
linguistics, language education, and cultural studies, Sounds
of Advocacy, Language and Liberation provides a representative spread of
linguistics addressing critical areas of academic and social responsibility
through the exploration and analysis of theoretical and sociocultural concerns.
Through his tireless research Devonish illuminated the complexities of
Caribbean Creole languages and championed their rightful place in academia and
society.

This festschrift
reveals the impact of Devonish's work on linguistic theory, spanning
fascinating topics like implosives in Jamaican Creole and the mathematical
constraints on allowable sentences in Guyanese Creole. The papers contain insightful
analyses of the relationship between language, education, and culture,
including Devonish's groundbreaking work on Creole language literacy and the
importance of promoting multilingualism. Provocative discussions on the
intersection of politics, law, and language, shed light on Devonish's
unwavering commitment to social justice and the empowerment of marginalised
communities.

More
than just a collection of academic contributions, Sounds of Advocacy serves as a tribute to Professor Devonish's
dedication to intellectual inquiry, social justice, and the advancement of
Caribbean languages and cultures.

Densil A. Williams explores the life and career of Sir Richard Benjamin Richardson, affectionately known as Richie, in this captivating biography. Richie, who began from modest beginnings in Five Islands Village, Antigua, rose to international cricket stardom. The book traces his evolution from a skilled footballer and hotel bartender to a dominant cricket player, and later a successful businessman and philanthropist. It showcases how Richie's early hardships, including his father's death, shaped his indomitable spirit and the leadership skills that would later define his illustrious career.

As captain of the West Indies Cricket Team from 1992 to 1996, Richie made a profound impact on the sport and lead his team to numerous victories. His innovative contributions, such as his iconic maroon broad hat and legendary hook shot, cemented his status as a cricket icon. Williams's narrative, enriched by meticulous research and Richie's own words, offers an intimate look at Richie's remarkable life both on and off the cricket field.

Richie's legacy transcends cricket, which marks him as an ambassador for Antigua and Barbuda and a global role model. This entry in the Caribbean Biography series not only celebrates Richie's sporting achievements and his contributions off the field - including receiving an honorary Doctor of Laws from the UWI, Five Islands Campus - but also highlights his resilience, leadership and triumph.

Jamaica is
most well-known for its popular culture, crime and violence. Government, the
state, is viewed as a malign force. In Politics in an Island State noted
anthropologist Diane Austin-Broos brings an alternative view of Jamaica, its
culture and governance. This history of Jamaica, and more pointedly, the
history of politics in Jamaica, is brilliantly told through the biography of
Wills O. Isaacs. Never the leader of his party - the People's National Party -
Wills was active in politics from the 1930s and was nonetheless a prominent and
notorious figure.

Informative
and entertaining, this biography of a second-tier political leader departs
from the usual heroic style and addresses the challenges of a fledgling social
democracy in the mid-twentieth century. Decolonization and the decline of
sugar, the Great Depression and two world wars frame the challenges of the
time. Flanked by rural-to-urban migration, unemployment and industrialization, Jamaica's
struggles into the twenty-first century and the conduct of government - the
successes, failures and foibles - are presented and viewed through a more
nuanced lens.

Leaders shape history, though they seldom dictate its
direction. Viewing history through their eyes affords a dynamic account of the
structures and events that underpin a society's development. Politics in an Island State will
find a ready audience with readers generally interested in the Caribbean, but
even more so with sages - both academic and unconventional - of anthropology,
history, foreign affairs, sociology, political science, development studies and
political economy.

In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbados's history, Hilary McD. Beckles details the systematic barbarism of the British colonial project. Trade in enslaved Africans was not new in the Americas in the seventeenth century - the Portuguese and Spanish had commercialized chattel slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the 1500s - but in Barbados, the practice of slavery reached its apotheosis.

Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, disposable workforce, fortunes that secured Britain's place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place.

A prequel to Beckles's equally compelling Britain's Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britain's Barbarity Time in Barbados, 1636-1876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.

There is
little if any research internationally, regionally, or locally on the factors
that facilitate or inhibit the educator in transitioning from an untrained,
experienced practitioner to a trained practitioner, particularly concerning the
sustainability of their practice. This
book fills that gap as it explores school contexts and cultures that educators
encounter post-teacher professional preparation and provides an understanding
of how to engineer an enabling environment for sustainable practice. The effectiveness of teacher
professional preparation programmes cannot be assessed in isolation from the education
culture and context to which teachers return.

Transferring Professional Learning
addresses the factors that facilitate and inhibit participants from sustainably
implementing what they have learnt on a professional preparation programme.
The series of cases presented in the book connect readers with real-life
stories of individuals whose experiences provide opportunities for reflection
on their own practice and pathways for growth individually and collectively. A
unique feature of the book is the discussion sections at the end of each
chapter, which, in essence, allow the reader to personalize and contextualize
the knowledge gained in each chapter, thereby providing a richer and deeper
hermeneutic experience. Thus, the structure of the book invokes meta-cognition.
The book draws attention to the critical role of context and culture in
sustaining the practices to which participants were introduced on the
programme, but even more so, it forces an interrogation of educators'
identities and personal philosophies. Through meaningful narratives, it
gives voice to the experiences of graduates working in various school
environments and cultural settings.

Jamaica is
most well-known for its popular culture, crime and violence. Government, the
state, is viewed as a malign force. In Politics in an Island State noted
anthropologist Diane Austin-Broos brings an alternative view of Jamaica, its
culture and governance. This history of Jamaica, and more pointedly, the
history of politics in Jamaica, is brilliantly told through the biography of
Wills O. Isaacs. Never the leader of his party - the People's National Party -
Wills was active in politics from the 1930s and was nonetheless a prominent and
notorious figure.

Informative
and entertaining, this biography of a second-tier political leader departs
from the usual heroic style and addresses the challenges of a fledgling social
democracy in the mid-twentieth century. Decolonization and the decline of
sugar, the Great Depression and two world wars frame the challenges of the
time. Flanked by rural-to-urban migration, unemployment and industrialization, Jamaica's
struggles into the twenty-first century and the conduct of government - the
successes, failures and foibles - are presented and viewed through a more
nuanced lens.

Leaders shape history, though they seldom dictate its
direction. Viewing history through their eyes affords a dynamic account of the
structures and events that underpin a society's development. Politics in an Island State will
find a ready audience with readers generally interested in the Caribbean, but
even more so with sages - both academic and unconventional - of anthropology,
history, foreign affairs, sociology, political science, development studies and
political economy.

A timely contribution to the corpus of
island studies scholarship, this collection centres key components of island
cultural studies. It emerges from the jointly organized 15th International Small
Island Cultures (ISIC) conference staged at The University of the West Indies,
Mona Campus (2018), and contains selected papers that shine a spotlight on the
rich cultural field of island music, art festivals and the creative ecosystem
in which they find support. With an interdisciplinary focus, this volume also
aims at promoting a critical research agenda for island studies in general.
This edited collection is a must read for cultural enthusiasts, students and researchers,
as well as entertainment and industry professionals.

Between 1939 and 1947, the Caribbean island of Jamaica -
then a British colony - was haven or detention centre for thousands of
displaced Europeans; an often under-recognized contribution to the Allied war effort.
A civilian camp accommodated evacuees from Gibraltar and, belatedly, provided
sanctuary for groups of mainly Jewish refugees. Others who had fled Europe
ahead of looming fascist threats would be interned in military detention camps
whose populations were swollen by German and Italian civilians from several
British West African colonies, co-mingled for convenience with hundreds of
German and Italian merchant mariners captured at sea during the early months of
the war.

World War II Camps in Jamaica disentangles the conditions
under which these various populations were held, drawing on primary records,
personal accounts and media coverage; noting differences and similarities in
their management; considering the camps and their populations within the local
context; and considering the extent of interface and interaction that ensued
despite official efforts to keep the incoming populations separate and transitory.

Thomas Thistlewood came to Jamaica from Lincolnshire, England in 1750, and lived as an estate overseer and small landowner in western Jamaica until his death in 1786. Throughout his life he kept a record of his daily activities and his observations of life around him. These diaries, about 10,000 pages, were deposited in the Lincolnshire Archives. They contain a rich chronicle of plantation life - its people, social life, agricultural techniques, medicinal remedies and relations between slaves and their owners.

The wealth of information left behind in the Thistlewood's diaries has been fashioned by Professor Hall into a remarkable account of planation life in Jamaica at the height of its era of sugar plantation prosperity. It gives historians and students of history a new perspective on the social history of mid eighteenth century Jamaica, the Tacky Rebellion, and the tenuous relations between planters and the Maroons. This reprint contains a revised index.

Originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1967 and then revised as a second edition in 1980, this classic study has never before been available in a paperback edition. This method and plan of the dictionary are basically those of the Oxford English Dictionary, but oral sources have been extensively tapped in addition to detailed coverage of literature published in or about Jamaica since 1655.

The dictionary is a mine of information about the Caribbean and its dialects, about the history of English and its dialects, and about Creole languages and general linguistic processes.

Entries give the pronunciation, part-of-speech and usage labels, spelling variants, etymologies and dated citations, as well as definitions. Systematic indexing indicates the extent to which the lexis is shared with other Caribbean countries: Suriname, Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, Nicaragua and Belize.

This book is a collection of essays by several distinguished scholars which began as a series of lectures sponsored by the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, to honour internationally recognized Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia. The collection consists of 13 lectures delivered between 1987 to 1998. The book is divided into two broad sections: In Slavery and Freedom, which features critical research on slavery and post-emancipation society, and Gender Paradigms. It will be particularly engaging to readers interested in Caribbean history, social history and gender studies.