The Continental Toehold Dilemma

September 22, 2016 By Casey Schmitt in Historiography, Opinion, Recent Scholarship Tags: 17th Century, Barbados, British Empire, Caribbean, Jamaica, Surinam, vastearlyamerica 2 Comments

nouvellecarte

“The heart of the English Empire in the seventeenth-century Americas was Barbados,” according to Justin Roberts in his recent William and Mary Quarterly article.[1] That claim is perhaps not surprising—Richard Dunn established the social and economic importance of the island over thirty years ago in his seminal work, Sugar and Slaves. However, Roberts takes that point further by exploring the political ramifications of all of that Barbadian wealth in the West Indies. His article also speaks to a larger sea change in the historiography of the seventeenth-century Caribbean. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Disaster, Death, and Distilleries

April 22, 2015 By Al Zuercher Reichardt in From the Archives, Guest Posts Tags: Atlantic History, Atlantic World, Barbados, capitalism, Caribbean, colonial New York, Distilleries, industrialization, Jamaica, labor history, Mount Gay Rum, race, Rum, Slavery 4 Comments

Today’s guest post comes from Jordan Smith, a PhD Candidate in Atlantic History at Georgetown University. His dissertation, “The Invention of Rum,” investigates the development and production of rum in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic World.

Warning: This post contains graphic accounts of industrial accidents.

On a recent research trip to Barbados, I stopped by the Mount Gay Visitors Center. There, between tastes of a variety of rums, tour guides regaled me with a heroic tale of Barbados’s place in the invention of rum. Afterwards, I was handed a brochure which proclaimed Mount Gay to be “the rum that invented rum.” The reasoning for this marketing strategy is simple enough—Mount Gay is one of many distilleries that makes a financial killing off of linking their product to a happy history of ingenuity and originality. Yet accounts of eighteenth-century distillery disasters suggest that this invention and innovation of rum was often undergirded by shocking violence. Continue reading →

Teaching Through Primary Sources: Henry Drax’s Plantation Instructions

January 14, 2014 By Ken Owen in From the Archives, Pedagogy Tags: Barbados, Henry Drax, pedagogy, Plantation, Slavery, teaching 3 Comments

Primary sources form an important part of the assignments for any of my undergraduate classes. As with any set readings, some of these sources work more successfully than others. One source that has proven reliably successful is Henry Drax’s instructions on running a sugar plantation in seventeenth-century Barbados. Back in my graduate student days, I prepared an initial transcription of the instructions as a research assistant. Thankfully, my students don’t have to grapple with some of the more eccentric approaches to handwriting in the original copy, and can instead read the 2009 William and Mary Quarterly “Sources and Interpretations” piece written by Peter Thompson. [1]

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The Week in Early American History

February 10, 2013 By Joseph M. Adelman in The Week in Early American History Tags: AAS, Aztec Empire, Barbados, David Library, Fellowships, First Ladies, Frederick Douglass, law, legal history, MOOCs, museums, post office, Slavery, sugar Leave a comment

TWEAH Mail service was suspended in New England on Saturday (sadly, a possible harbinger of things to come), but a massive snowstorm (and the pain of shoveling) cannot stop the Junto’s week-in-review post.

It seems odd that the day is passing with relatively little fanfare, but today is actually the 250th anniversary of the Treaty of Paris ending the Seven Years’ War. A momentous occasion with enormous consequences (that were, as often happens, largely unforeseen at the time).

In any event, on with the links!

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