In Memoriam Michael Craton, Historian

Abstract

In Memoriam Michael Craton, Historian Bridget Brereton, Ph.D. Introduction Michael Craton, who died in September 2016, was an English/Canadian historian who made a major contribution to the historiography of the English-speaking Caribbean. He was born in London in 1931, and educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham, West Sussex, and at University College London, where he graduated with a B.A. in History in 1955. He spent six years after graduation teaching at the Government High School in Nassau, The Bahamas, before emigrating to Canada in 1963, obtaining his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at McMaster University in Ontario. In 1966 he joined the faculty at the University of Waterloo, also in Ontario, and stayed there until his retirement in 1997. He was named a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in 1998. Click for larger view View full resolution Michael Craton The History of Small Islands It was the stint teaching high school history in Nassau which brought Craton to the history of The Bahamas, and by extension, of the Caribbean. In the 1950s, little professional research on Bahamian history had been undertaken, and this group of small and scattered islands tended [End Page 215] to be left out of historical and other works on the Caribbean (strictly speaking, it is located in the Atlantic rather than the Caribbean). Over the next decades, books and articles by Craton—and by his frequent collaborator, D. Gail Saunders, and one or two other historians, notably Howard Johnson—transformed Bahamian historiography, bringing it firmly into the mainstream of the renaissance of professional historical writing on the Caribbean. Craton's A History of The Bahamas first appeared in 1962 and went through several revised and updated editions, the most recent in 2009. It remains the most important single-volume general history of that nation. In the 1990s, Craton and Saunders, the founding National Archivist of The Bahamas and his former Ph.D. student at Waterloo, co-authored the two-volume Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People (1992, 1998). This was a deeply researched, detailed and comprehensive social history of The Bahamas from pre-Columbian times to the end of the 20th century; Volume 2 won the prestigious Elsa Goveia Prize of the Association of Caribbean Historians. After retirement, Craton continued to publish on The Bahamas: in 2002 his authorized biography of Lynden Pindling, the first Prime Minister of the nation, appeared, followed in 2007 by his A-Z of Bahamas Heritage, in the well-known Macmillan Caribbean series, which he was invited to write. No doubt his work on The Bahamas won Craton the commission to research the history of the Cayman Islands, a group of even smaller islands not far from the former. The result was Founded upon the Seas: a History of the Cayman Islands and their People (2003), a detailed and thoroughly professionally researched study of these little communities of fishing and sea-faring folk. Thanks in good part to Craton's work, these small islands can now boast of comprehensive and professional histories. This was reflected in his chapter 'The Historiography of The Bahamas, Turks & Caicos Islands, Cayman Islands and Belize' in Volume VI of the UNESCO General History of the Caribbean (1998). Plantations, Enslavement, Resistance From his initial interest in Bahamian history, Craton soon took up broader themes of the region's past, especially plantation society, enslavement and resistance. In 1970, with his other frequent collaborator, the British historian James Walvin, they wrote A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670-1970. This pioneering study was based on rich plantation records from 300 years of continuous operation as a sugar estate; it was the first book-length history of a single Caribbean plantation. In 1978, Craton revisited Worthy Park in his Searching for the [End Page 216] Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica. This book provided a detailed social history of Worthy Park's slaves and their descendants, including selected individual biographies and utilizing oral history as well as documentary sources. In the mid-1970s, Craton authored or co-edited two useful general works on British Caribbean slavery and emancipation. His Sinews of Empire (1974) was a good popular...