Saturday, June 4, 2011

Five of the Leewards, 1834-1870

Hall, Douglas, Five of the Leewards, 1834-1870: The Major Problems of the Post-Emancipation Period in Antigua, Barbuda, Montserrat, Nevis, and St. Kitts, Barbados: Caribbean University Press, 1971.

Cited in Emancipation and Revolt in the West Indies: St. Kitts, 1834.

Douglas Hall (from the "Preface"):
As a Resident Tutor in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of the West Indies in 1955-7, I lived in Antigua and St. Kitts and worked there and also in Montserrat and Nevis. As I came to know these islands I was struck by the very real social and economic differences between them. Yet in the 18th and early 19th centuries they had all been 'sugar colonies' (though Montserrat had been the least distinguished as such), ruled by their plantocracies and worked by slave-labour to produce sugar, rum, and molasses for the export-trade. And they all lie within a geographical circle of about seventy miles in diameter. I thought that a comparative study of their histories since the Emancipation would be both interesting and helpful to an understanding of their present separate circumstances.

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