The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770 - 1820

Brathwaite, Edward, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770 - 1820, Oxford : Clarendon, 1971.

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS2306 Notes 08D:

Brathwaite’s The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica is, by his own description, a “historical study with a socio-cultural emphasis” (xiv) and, one as such, with decisive implications for understanding Caribbean society as a whole in the twentieth society. His thesis here is that the

people, mainly from Britain and West Africa, who settled, lived, worked and were born in Jamaica, contributed to the formation of a society . . . which, in so far as it was neither purely British nor West African, is . . . creole. (xiii)

The term ‘creole’ as used by Brathwaite denotes, when applied to persons, both whites and blacks, freeborn and slave, “born in, native to, committed to the area of living” (xv). When applied to the general society, it denotes both a colonial relationship with a “metropolitan European power, on the one hand, and a plantation arrangement on the other” (xv). Creole Jamaica, Brathwaite is explicit, was a society in which there was a “juxtaposition of master and slave, élite and labourer, in a culturally heterogeneous relationship” (xvi). Although “multi-racial” (xv), it was “organised from the benefit of a minority of European origin” (xv).

Reviewed in American Journal of Sociology © 1974.

Reviewed in The Journal of Negro History © 1973.