the way down to Madagascar are underestimated in the historiography (Paine, 2013: 268–72). Undoubtedly, as Nicolini has argued, they contextualised Swahili integration into Omani commerce. Conjoined circuits of Saharan trade, created by the empires of the Niger Delta and Ethiopia in earlier centuries, formed the backdrop of zones of contact, communication and exchange with Islamic and Christian civilisations. The importance of historical trades for commerce and state formation in the West Indian Ocean has also been underestimated. As elsewhere, cross
middle-class West Indian children, he is indulged. He loves comic books – the large, brightly coloured American ones, and later the smaller, grittier black-and-white ones with British Second World War stories. This passion is one of the few he and his father share, and so the man funds and shares his son’s insatiable appetite for them. I cannot say that I knew my father well. Perhaps he did
leaving office in July 1765, forecast to George III that the new ministry would seek to overturn his colonial policy.63 He can hardly then have anticipated repeal of the Stamp Act, but must have been aware that other measures had aroused discontent in Britain and America. The Rockingham party especially prided itself on support of trade, a legacy from Newcastle, and cultivated mercantile connections. During the Stamp Act Crisis the ministry cast a benign eye on requests for the removal and alteration of trade restrictions, even giving West Indian and North American
has marked them’. 38 Having already rehabilitated the West Indian and the Irishman in The West Indian (1771) and the Scot in The Fashionable Lover (1772), Cumberland created a play, The Jew , in which Sheva, the title character, serves as the moral centre, educating and disciplining an unprincipled English merchant and rescuing needy Christians. The play was extremely successful and generated an enormous amount of public discussion. Michael Ragussis credits Cumberland’s play with softening the hardened
were refugees from East Africa, mostly Uganda and Kenya. These groups, also originally from the sub-continent, but largely running businesses in Africa, suffered persecution at the hands of newly independent regimes. Forced out of their adopted countries, and often having their businesses confiscated, these Asians found a natural home in the UK. Since then immigration has become more diffuse. The numbers are less than in the 1950s to 1970s, but the origins of immigrants have widened. The immigration ‘mix’ now includes Africans, West Indians, Sub-continent Asians
emergence of British Guiana’s first national poet, Egbert Martin, best known to his readers as ‘Leo’. Throughout the 1880s, before his death in 1890, Martin published two collections of poetry, a book of short stories, and numerous uncollected works in every major periodical in British Guiana. The Guiana Herald claimed he was ‘far and away the first West Indian poet’. 23 About this characterisation A. J. Seymour writes, ‘I presume the writer means first in quality’, although, given what I have suggested above, the description does double duty, not only glorifying
colonial economies and relieving unemployment, but not at any cost. It would never displace the central place of agricultural production that was considered the natural and most suitable activity for Britain’s tropical possessions. Sydney Caine was an advocate of industrialisation in the Caribbean but he did not believe that manufacturing would replace sugar production as the principal economic activity of Britain’s West Indian territories. The Colonial Office attempted to rework and modernise the meanings of cane sugar through a search for new uses for this commodity as
’s Caribbean colonies, and relations between the sugar companies and their workforces were often very poor. Trinidad saw repeated unrest on its sugar estates in the post-war period, and a proliferation of unions made cooperation and consensus difficult to attain. We can also wonder about the discussions that seem likely to have occurred at firms such as Tate & Lyle about the fate of sugar operations once independence came for Britain’s West Indian possessions. Although nationalisation did not become reality in the period before independence, and in the case of Trinidad it
British artists, for whom performance poetry has been an important (although only one) mode in the 1980s and 1990s. But the point might also be made here that of the sixty or so black British poets writing, recording or performing in Britain, only a handful, whether writing for the page or for the stage, are brought to the attention of students of literature or discussed in critical essays. Moreover, African and West Indian British poets generally enjoy a greater visibility than Asian British poets, despite notable exceptions such as Debjani Chatterjee. Renewed focus on
-Century Adriatic (Ithaca, NY, 1992). 65 A. Clulow, ‘From Global Entrepôt to Early Modern Domain: Hirado, 1609–1641’, Monumenta Nipponica, 65:1 (2010). 66 K. Lane, ‘Punishing the Sea Wolf: Corsairs and Cannibals in the Early Modern Caribbean’, NWIG: New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 77:3–4 (2003). 67 On the concept of ‘raiding clusters’ see: Keeley, War Before Civilization, pp. 127–41. 68 For ‘raiding economies’ see: Bracewell, The Uskoks of Senj. 69 J. Hooper, ‘Pirates and Kings: Power on the Shores of Early Modern Madagascar and the Indian Ocean