According to David Howard, ‘[p]erhaps one of the most enduring legacies of colonialism is that of resistance’ (Howard, 2004 p. 148). This lecture considers resistance to slavery and colonialism as an endemic feature of the Caribbean region, ranging from everyday acts of cultural reproduction to episodic rebellions.

Lecture reading

Barcia Paz, Manuel, The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas (Baton Rouge, 2012).

Beckles, H., ‘Caribbean Anti-Slavery: The Self-Liberation Ethos of Enslaved Blacks’ in Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (eds), Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (London, 2000), pp. 869-878.

Craton, Michael, ‘Forms of Resistance to Slavery’, in Franklin W. Knight (ed.), The Slave Societies of the Caribbean, UNESCO History of the Caribbean, vol. 3 (London, 1997), pp. 222-270.

Craton, Michael, ‘Proto-Peasant Revolts? The Late Slave Rebellions in the British West Indies, 1816-1832’, Past and Present, 85 (1979), pp. 99-125.

Craton, Michael, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY, 1982).

Diouf, Sylvianne A. (ed.), Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Athens, OH, 2003).

Heuman, G., The Caribbean (London: Hodder, 2006), chapter 6.

Howard, David, ‘Caribbean Social Perspectives’ in Tracy Skelton (ed.), Introduction to the Pan-Caribbean (London, 2004), pp. 136-153.

Kars, Marjoleine, ‘Dodging Rebellion: Politics and Gender in the Berbice Slave Uprising of 1763’, American Historical Review, 121: 1 (2016), pp. 39–69.

Lambert, David, ‘Producing/Contesting Whiteness: Rebellion, Anti-Slavery and Enslavement in Barbados, 1816’, Geoforum, 36 (2005), pp. 29-43.

Lambert, David, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 105-139.

Mullin, Michael, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana, 1992).

Richardson, Bonham C., ‘Plantations and their People to 1900’ in The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 158-183.

Segal, R., Black Diaspora (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), chapter 13.

On-line sources

'Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760-1761: A Cartographic Narrative', http://revolt.axismaps.com/

This animated thematic map narrates the spatial history of the greatest slave insurrection in the eighteenth century British Empire.