This chapter traces Paul Cullen’s invovlement in the extra-European church, first in the United States and then the Caribbean, Nova Scotia, India, and Gibraltar.

This chapter introduces African work and lays out the book's key argument: African work in Grenada is not a residue of recaptive Yoruba peoples but emerged from exchanges on and beyond Grenada. It examines the nineteenth-century slave trade, British suppression, the displacement of Yoruba speakers, and the various indentureship schemes in the British Caribbean. It provides a critical examination of the historiography of Grenada's African-derived religious cultures and recaptured Africans and shows how the book re-conceptualises the cultural legacies of recaptured Africans, particularly through 'un-islanding' the Orisa religion. This introductory chapter also outlines the wide range of sources used in the work, such as oral, archival, and ethnographic material.

Even after the soldiers of the West India Regiments helped to suppress enslaved uprisings in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), they continued to be objects of suspicion. This chapter examines the efforts that commanding officers and supporters of the regiments made to challenge such opposition by seeking to manage the image of their Black soldiers and portray them in a favourable light. What emerged was the ‘steady Black soldier’, an ambiguous racial-martial figure that was simultaneously soldierly yet passive. This theme is explored through both the predominant representation of the soldiers as standing ‘ready for inspection’ and the elision of any active military role. This image is placed in the context of wider debates about the figure of the Black subject that characterised the contemporaneous controversy over slavery and it will be argued that the steady Black soldier represents the military equivalent to the kneeling enslaved figure promulgated by anti-slavery advocates.

This chapter traces debates and arguments around black freedom that animated discussions on amelioration and emancipation in both British metropole and colony. Much of this was predicated on fear, where the ever present Hydra of slave rebellion and disorder threatened, even as enslaved people’s revolutionary acts helped stimulate a metropolitan abolitionist movement. The chapter argues that this preeminent association of black freedom with disorder shaped the boundaries of emancipation and thus the parameters of the experiment.

This chapter describes the process of choosing and preparing the data investigated in the present study. It starts with a definition of the notion of ‘culture’ and then introduces the data that form the basis for the analysis. The interactions analysed were extracted from two larger corpora, the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) and two components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) – ICE-Jamaica and ICE-Trinidad and Tobago. The chapter then describes how a collection of unscripted natural conversations was compiled for the project and briefly comments on the transcription process involved. It illustrates how qualitative analysis can be successfully combined with subsequent quantification and shows why this is essential in comparative conversation analytic research. The last part of the chapter provides a detailed description of the codification procedure and the formal coding system developed for the project, before summarising the steps involved in the quantitative part of the analysis.

This chapter meditates on the genre of the photographic essay by considering the author’s own photographic essay on Caribbean culture and family histories. The author proposes that photography enables a different kind of attention, a different kind of knowing, and an attitude toward time that is itself essayistic.

This chapter focuses on the relationality been enslavement, punishment, and convict mobility in the French, Spanish and British empires in the Caribbean, into the 1870s, arguing for an interconnected approach to punitive European geopolitics. Following the Haitian Revolution and the closure of Spanish colonies to enslaved convicts from other polities, British judicial process used penal transportation to the distant colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land. During the 1830s, however, they were closed off following the development of anti-transportation sentiments. At this time, Britain’s West Indian colonies had for some years been interested in the establishment of a penal colony in the Caribbean region. Anti-transportation ideas reignited these debates, and British Guiana and Trinidad each established remote, inland penal settlements, but only for locally convicted felons. The chapter notes that in discussions about the abolition of the slave trade at the turn of the nineteenth century, pro-slavery campaigners justified it through the comparison of judicial enslavement and penal transportation. This provides important background for understanding the use of the language of enslavement more generally as a rhetorical device in broader debates about the abolition of transportation and its aftermath in the Caribbean.

Few historians have noticed that, from the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies (1834) to the same milestone in the United States (1865), the planters of the British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guiana made repeated attempts to entice over the black Americans whose white rulers seemed so eager to expel them. The planters’ offer divided abolitionists, who heard echoes of the prejudicial premise of Liberian colonization, but who also saw an opportunity to boost the free-labor British Caribbean. The 2,000 black Americans and Canadians who immigrated to the British West Indies at the turn of the 1840s found many things to commend in their new home – and many things to condemn. Such ambivalence about the entire venture was shared by the British government, which forever feared that colonial canvassers would jeopardize Anglo-American relations by accepting fugitive slaves. Latterly joined by the other European powers with West Indian colonies, namely, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark, Britain approached the matter gingerly during the American Civil War, when the prospect of benefiting from wholesale emancipation, but under the fraught auspices of the US military, offered unimaginable risk and reward.

This essay explores how authors, texts, and forms moved throughout the Caribbean in the period, transgressing boundaries of language and geography. Regional responses to the Haitian Revolution and other Caribbean antislavery and anticolonial movements reveal the clear trans-Caribbean focus of many nineteenth-century Caribbean writers. Additionally, the growing sphere of newspapers provided a concrete means through which ideas circulated throughout the region. This chapter looks primarily to Haiti and Trinidad as early examples through which to consider literary anglophone–francophone connections and the formations of Caribbean identity that heavily influenced later Caribbean writers. I argue that the circulation of ideas and authors in the period ultimately generated complex negotiation of contested spaces, shifting boundaries, and complex identities that gave rise to conceptions of creoleness and exile that are foundational to Caribbean literature.

John Jacob Thomas’s mid-nineteenth-century career exemplifies the contradictions of the post-abolition period. A schoolteacher who authored Theory and Practice of Creole Grammar (1869) and Froudacity: West Indian Fables Explained (1888), he parsed, literally and symbolically, the grammar of freedom. What did it mean to be free in a world in which non-whiteness was synonymous with servitude, and in which blackness and intellect were considered to be oxymoronic? Thomas’s efforts to vindicate 'freedom’s children' – the successors of the generation of enslavement – shed light on conceptions of mimicry, respectability, and literary and political authority that continue to shadow our postcolonial moment.