This introductory chapter provides an overview of the origins of the West India Regiments in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean. It then introduces key concepts that will be used throughout the book, especially that of ’military spectacle’ (from Scott Myerly) as well as ’martial hybridity’, which is a take on Homi Bhabha’s formulation. The chapter goes on to argue that the Black soldiers of the regiments are an important but hitherto ignored feature in what Catherine Hall termed the ’war of representation’ that was fought over slavery and the image of people of African descent. It ends by outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

This chapter considers a key change in the military spectacle of the West India Regiments in the mid-to-late 1850s when the uniform for all ranks below commissioned officer was altered to one inspired by France’s Zouave forces. Representing a form of martial rebranding, this was a dramatic shift that ended the policy of using the same basic uniforms as other British Foot Regiments. Two interpretive frames for this ‘Zouavisation’ of the West India Regiments are offered. First, there was a desire to emulate and replicate the picturesque valour that the French Zouaves had displayed in the Crimean War, a sentiment strongly expressed by Queen Victoria herself. Second, there was an effort to assign uniforms that were more sensitive to the local conditions in which British military units operated. In the case of the West India Regiments, this policy served to inscribe racial differences between troops, as demonstrated by the fact that the officers of the regiments were not required to wear Zouave-style uniforms. This change reflected shifting ideas about people of African descent, as well as about tropicality, in this period.

Even after the soldiers of the West India Regiments helped to suppress enslaved uprisings in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), they continued to be objects of suspicion. This chapter examines the efforts that commanding officers and supporters of the regiments made to challenge such opposition by seeking to manage the image of their Black soldiers and portray them in a favourable light. What emerged was the ‘steady Black soldier’, an ambiguous racial-martial figure that was simultaneously soldierly yet passive. This theme is explored through both the predominant representation of the soldiers as standing ‘ready for inspection’ and the elision of any active military role. This image is placed in the context of wider debates about the figure of the Black subject that characterised the contemporaneous controversy over slavery and it will be argued that the steady Black soldier represents the military equivalent to the kneeling enslaved figure promulgated by anti-slavery advocates.

The secondary status of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean popular music is explored with an emphasis on recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, and reggae as the region’s most widely globalized music. Early guitarists in Jamaican popular music, Ernest Ranglin and Lynn Taitt, are referenced, alongside analyses of the instrument in the reggae recordings of The Wailers, and the works of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh featuring other players such as Donald Kinsey in lead guitar roles. The chapter utilizes first-hand interviews with key figures and also focuses on Eddy Grant as one of the most visible Caribbean guitarists through his international pop star career spanning several decades. The twenty-first-century emergence of the Trinidad-based metal act Orange Sky, fusing rock and reggae influences, is also discussed.

Horses represented an expensive and logistically challenging aspect of early expeditions, as they had to be brought by boat and then bred in colonial settlements to aid in expansion. This scarcity only elevated the cultural and political significance of horses, evident in the narratives of early Spanish or Indigenous chroniclers and also in strategic efforts to breed horses in colonial settlements, despite the challenging and varied new environments. Beyond the military lore of conquest, horses literally and materially served as the measure for establishing social status, access to political office, and territorial control by colonial representatives, shaping the structure and strategy of colonial expansion in powerful ways.

In this chapter, we examine the evolving definition of sex tourism. Through a comprehensive literature review focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean, we assess the long history of commodified sex and travel and the difficulties in defining the practice as exclusive to heterosexual men purchasing sex or as a phenomenon exclusive to the Global South. A case study of Havana, Cuba, contributes to a deeper understanding of how colonial cities benefitted from commodified sex connected to travellers and racialized bodies. In analyzing the scholarship on sex tourism, we appreciate the heterogeneity of arrangements, identities, ambiguity, and fluidity of relationships. Both hosts and guests are looking for opportunities to enhance their lives and to challenge the gender, sexual, and racial dictates of their society. Tourist-related intimacies, therefore, are used for personal and familial gains and mobility in the global political economy. The findings reveal that while some studies have adopted narrow definitions, a more comprehensive approach argues for understanding sex tourism as part of a spectrum of intimate encounters that combine sex and money, encompassing everything from marriage to sex work.

This chapter explores a global panorama of settlement projects by French émigrés in the 1790s. These projects – partly realized, planned, or imagined – aimed at transforming the émigré diaspora into defined territories. Situated between the Americas, the Caribbean, North Africa, the Russian Empire, and Australia, these projects allow, on the one hand, for analysis of the émigrés’ political options and spatial imaginaries of exile in relation to political loyalty and the possibility of a return to France. On the other hand, they highlight the émigrés’ strategic and situational relationship toward French, British, and Spanish imperialism and colonial slavery. Such a spatialized perspective on political migration helps in reconsidering the agency of French émigrés. No longer appearing as “absentees” from the revolution, their mobility and awareness about the global impact of the “age of emigrations” provided them with alternative options to the radicalizing revolution in France that also impacted the post-revolutionary order.

This chapter goes into the postcolonial development of literacy in the Caribbean. To begin with, the sociolinguistic background of language and literacy planning in native and (ex-)colonial languages across Caribbean nations is highlighted. Over the past century, a far-reaching process of decolonization has taken place in the Caribbean, a region of insular territories with mostly native Creole-speaking communities, in between North and South America. Special attention is given to the use of these languages in education and the effects on the actual attainment of literacy levels in native and colonial languages across Caribbean states. There is an additional focus on postcolonial literacy development in the Dutch Caribbean; this is an interesting case in which the Creole language Papiamentu has become highly valued in media, education, and other social domains, replacing Dutch. The focus is on the gradual implementation of Papiamentu literacy in the curriculum, and the literacy levels in native Papiamentu and Dutch as a (foreign) colonial language throughout the primary grades, and their relations with school success. Finally, a future perspective on postcolonial literacy development in the Caribbean is provided.

In July 2019, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave, Brooklyn went dark. In 90-degree temperatures, over 55,000 customers in Canarsie, Flatlands, Mill Basin, Bergen Beach, and Georgetown lost electricity in one of the largest power outages in New York’s history. Con Edison, the city’s power company, admitted that it deliberately disconnected these neighborhoods in order to prevent a widespread loss of power that would affect wealthier, whiter areas of the city. Although Black neighborhoods earn the highest scores in New York City’s heat vulnerability index (a ranking system that takes into account the proportion of green space to developed space, access to air conditioning, and the percentage of people living below poverty levels), they are the first on the line when the city’s infrastructure fails.1 What the index does not take into account, however, are the social and political risks to which these neighborhoods are also exposed during a blackout. After the lights went out, 200 police officers flooded Brooklyn, with the nebulous mandate to preserve order. A week earlier, the US Department of Justice had announced that it would not press charges against Daniel Pantaleo, the white police officer who killed Eric Garner on Staten Island in 2014. Now law enforcement roamed the streets of Canarsie, policing Black children for splashing water in 90-degree heat.

Free people of color were major and perhaps inevitable actors during the age of the Atlantic revolutions. Based particularly on the French experience, this chapter seeks to illustrate, in all its varieties, the evolution of the aspirations (equality, civil rights, and suppression of color prejudice) and actions (conspiracies, revolts, and petitions) of free people of color of the Caribbean islands and the consequences for colonial institutions. It also attempts to show the links and the spread of these aspirations and actions between territories. It focuses in particular on the use of free people of color in the military sphere and its impact, the political role of the métissés elites of Saint-Domingue, the effects of the French Revolution and the policies of Victor Hugues in the Caribbean on the aspirations and actions of free people of color in the French, Spanish and English colonies, and the struggles for civic equality and abolition in the 19th century.

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has two regional court systems, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court and the Caribbean Court of Justice. A product of political and economic integration, each court has taken a different evolutionary path resulting in different constitutional arrangements, but neither make nationality a criterion for appointment to judicial office. This chapter considers the concept of ‘foreignness’ in relation to these two regional Caribbean courts. It draws on the results of structured interviews with judicial officers and attorneys from across the region to analyse perceptions about the significance of judges’ nationality to the quality of judging and public expectations. The findings suggest that – in the Caribbean context which is shaped by regionalism, small communities and the legacies of colonialism – nationality does not matter as much as the impartiality, competency, and efficiency of the judge.

Britain had a substantial Atlantic empire during the era of the Atlantic Revolutions. Only some of their Atlantic colonies joined in the colonial rebellion that led to the creation of the United States. The end of the American Revolution signaled a new period in the history of the British Empire, but it was far from a period in which the Empire’s geographic center moved decisively to the East from the West. The British colonies in the Atlantic World that either remained or were acquired during the Atlantic Revolutions were vital parts of a changing geopolitical and economic order in which Britain solidified its global dominance in the period economic historians have termed the Great Divergence (when the West overtook the East in economic power). The British West Indies and Canada were central to the Atlantic Revolutions from the period of the Seven Years’ War until the end of slavery in the British West Indies in 1834. Expansion in the British Atlantic after 1783 showed how valuable West Indian colonies continued to be to British geopolitical and economic policies and how Canada was rapidly becoming a set of colonies that were developing into vibrant settler societies.

Foreign judging in the small jurisdictions in the Anglo Caribbean is ubiquitous and diverse. It is evident in extraterritorial and hybrid courts and a diverse group of foreign judicial officers. This chapter defines foreign judging to include intra- and extra-Caribbean personnel and institutions and complicates the image of the foreign judge as entirely an outsider. The chapter traces ways in which foreign judging has refined understandings of judicial independence in the Caribbean. It examines the dynamics of the two apex extraterritorial courts, one a surviving imperial court (the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council) and the other a more modern decolonisation-driven treaty-based court (the Caribbean Court of Justice). The chapter looks at how conceptions of judicial tenure until retirement are upended by mobile judges who serve consecutively or concurrently in more than one jurisdiction. It also explores how the stringent requirements for removal of a judge are recalibrated by the heightened scrutiny of judicial conduct in small jurisdictions.