West Indian Colonies Research Articles

Blood transfusion in the Caribbean: Historical perspective in the context of Trinidad and Tobago.

To compare the historical development of blood transfusion in Britain and a former British West Indian colony. International transfusion bodies recommend national coordination and exclusively voluntary non-remunerated donation as essential pre-requisites for blood safety. These ideals have been achieved in high-income countries including Great Britain, the United States of America and Canada. However, most West Indian countries have fragmented, hospital-based blood services that rely on family replacement and remunerated donors. Comparative historical analysis of blood transfusion service development in Great Britain and Trinidad and Tobago was undertaken to provide insight into their dichotomous development and inform policy decisions to bridge the gap between the two types of transfusion service. The British National Blood Transfusion service was based on voluntary non-remunerated blood donation from its inception but achieved national coordination over 50 years that included a period of regional control during which incoordination contributed to a tainted blood scandal. Failure to establish community voluntary non-remunerated donation in Trinidad and Tobago during the colonial period, before independence in 1962, allowed regionally-controlled family replacement and remunerated blood donation to become entrenched then perpetuated by path dependence. A university-led programme has recently used historically-proven methods, drawing on the experiences of the British National Blood Transfusion Service, to establish a model for developing a voluntary non-remunerated programme. The programme aims to avoid historical pitfalls during its national extension. Historical analysis provided information for introducing voluntary non-remunerated blood donation and planning a nationally-coordinated blood transfusion service.

An economic rationale for the different methods of feeding enslaved people in the antebellum South and British West Indies

This article focuses on two different systems of feeding enslaved people. In the first system, primarily associated with the cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations of antebellum South and the early sugar plantations of the British West Indies, the obligation to feed enslaved people was executed by the plantation. In contrast, under a second system known as provisioning associated with the later British West Indian colonies, the master allocated land to enslaved people on which they would grow their own food. Over time, this land was understood, in the wider community of both those enslaved and the planters, to be the “property” of the enslaved person. This article offers potential explanations both for why provisioning was adopted in the West Indies, and why provisioning did not take hold in southern U.S. plantations. Following Ronald Coase’s Nature of the Firm, we should expect to see provisioning when doing so economizes on transaction and agency costs. As it became more difficult to purchase imported food, plantations had to provide their own food. Provisioning sacrificed the plantations’ claims to surplus food, but in the West Indies such decentralized production could enhance incentives for enslaved people to produce their own food while economizing on the need for supervision.

Global Revolutions

Global Revolutions

Två gräl. Slavhandel, kvinnokamp och moraliskt gnissel i Fredrika Bremers Grannarne

This article examines Fredrika Bremer’s novel The Neighbours (Grannarne, 1837), and in particular two scenes in which respectively the transatlantic slave trade and Islam are debated. Together, these two quarrels form a feminist, nationalist argument against slavery, using an image of a misogynistic Orient as backdrop. The Neighbours present an unusually explicit discussion about the transatlantic slave trade, while at the same time simultaneously acknowledging and trivializing it. The economic system of slavery is tied to the transatlantic slave trade in The Neighbours, as the reader learns that a man that has become rich from trade with West Indian colonies has also been kidnapping people and selling them into slavery. The contemporary failure to acknowledge the connection between colonial trade and the transatlantic slave trade is implicitly critiqued in the novel through presenting the reader with two versions of his past; one official, censored, version and one that is kept a secret.

Plantation Coffee in Jamaica 1790–1848

Plantation Coffee in Jamaica 1790–1848

Why Black Homeowners are More Likely to be Caribbean American than African American in New York: A Theory of How Early West Indian Migrants Broke Racial Cartels in Housing

Abstract Why are the Black brownstone owners and landlords in Harlem and Brooklyn disproportionately West Indian? For students of housing discrimination, Black West Indian Americans have long presented a quandary. West Indian Americans generally own and rent higher quality housing than African Americans. These advantages began long ago. For example, when racial covenants, that is, restrictions barring certain racial and ethnic groups from owning real property were rife in New York, many West Indians were still able to buy into tony neighborhoods despite the pervasiveness of institutionalized residential segregation. Eschewing more traditional explanations in the civil rights literature, I apply the literature in which racial segregation in real property ownership is conceived as a racialized monopoly in which racial cartels appropriate anti-competitive techniques to monopolize access to real property. Maintaining a racial cartel is dependent on White owners uniformly refusing to sell. Importantly, West Indian realtors were experts at finding defectors, namely Whites willing to break norms of racial exclusivity and sell, in exchange for their ability to extract a premium. West Indian brokers could act in confidence because they had cash-rich clients and were often buying property in trust (de facto if not de jure) for fellow West Indians. In so doing, West Indian brokers in New York were simply replicating techniques that had been utilized by their land-brokering ancestors. I discuss the history that “previews” this period in New York, albeit in a different context: in the British West Indian islands from which the migrants originated. There are repeated instances of Blacks “busting” White monopolies in landownership, throughout the West Indian colonies in contravention of racial norms in the British colonies of who was allowed to own land and where. Upon arrival in New York, West Indians encountered another racial monopoly in real property ownership, namely Northern racial segregation. They essentially transferred the same techniques that they had utilized in the West Indies to break into White neighborhoods in New York.

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

Hawthorne and Presentism: A Backward Glance

A Disagreeable Text

Abstract Bryan Edwards’s The History of the British West Indies is a text well known to historians of the Caribbean and the early modern Atlantic World. First published in 1793, the work is widely considered to be a classic of British Caribbean literature. This article introduces an unpublished first draft of Edwards’s preface to that work. Housed in the archives of the West India Committee in Westminster, England, this preface has never been published or fully analyzed by scholars in print. It offers valuable insight into the production of West Indian history at the end of the eighteenth century. In particular, it shows how colonial planters confronted the challenges of their day by attempting to wrest the practice of writing West Indian history from their critics in Great Britain. Unlike these metropolitan writers, Edwards had lived in the West Indian colonies for many years. He positioned his personal experience as being a primary source of his historical legitimacy.

Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor

Reviewed by: Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism by Christopher Taylor Theodore Koditschek (bio) Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism, by Christopher Taylor; pp. xi + 307. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, $104.95, $27.95 paper, £80.00, £20.99 paper. In a world dominated by the competitive logic of free trade, what happens to those groups and places whose diminished profitability consigns them to feelings of abandonment and neglect? Christopher Taylor's Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism gives that question a hefty dose of historical depth. In the eighteenth century, the West Indian sugar colonies had been considered the crown jewel of Britain's mercantilist Empire. Yet, during the nineteenth century, their status radically changed. As slavery was anathematized, and the plantations grew less remunerative, celebrations of success were replaced by anguished handwringing. Once cheaper sources of sugar became available from Brazil and Cuba where (after British emancipation) slavery remained in place, Britain's West Indian colonies increasingly were perceived as embarrassments by a metropolitan public whose attention was turning in other directions. Taylor's interest, however, is in the responses of people in the Caribbean Isles. Taylor begins with Adam Smith and later political economists, whom he portrays as having ushered in the ascendancy of a calculus of self-interest to mainstream metropolitan behavior and thought. Profitable colonies ought to become independent, while unprofitable ones were not worth keeping. In the West Indies, this was perceived as a betrayal of the social contract under which the empire had been forged. In the anonymously published novel Marly (1828) and a series of other texts, the planters offered an alternative vision of plantation protection and social interconnection that drew on nostalgic representations of the mercantilist epoch. But if a social contract could be invoked by the oppressors, it could be refigured by the oppressed in a more compelling way. In chapter 2, Taylor focuses on the loss of protection that emancipation brought to black West Indians exploited under the system of apprenticeship and then left in an unfavorable labor market once the process of emancipation was complete. Through a reading of James Williams's Narrative of Events (1837), Taylor shows how black working people experienced the state of worthlessness to which they were thus consigned. Taylor next traces the mid-century vicissitudes of a planter, Matthew Higgins, who wrapped his demand for a return to protection in the moralizing veneer of defending the freedman. He juxtaposes this against the work of a mixed-race Trinidadian, Michel Philip, whose white father's abandonment inspired novelistic fantasies of revenge. In chapter 4, Taylor follows the career of George Des Sources, another mixed-race Trinidadian, whose disappointment at the refusal of British imperial citizenship motivated him to turn to Hispanic Venezuela, where he induced a group of British West Indian emigrants to establish a utopian socialist colony. Finally, Taylor turns to Mary Seacole, a Jamaican hotelier and nurse who eventually traveled to England and Crimea. There, she applied a nurturant sensibility first cultivated in the West Indies. Because Taylor is a literary scholar, he close reads a wide variety of texts, with the ostensible aim of showing how West Indian literature "emerged as a genre and epistemological alternative to political economy" (9). Yet this book also takes on a less explicit (but far more ambitious) agenda that seeks to reinterpret the entire nineteenth-century West Indian experience though the lens of its inhabitants' perceptions of neglect. Taylor [End Page 331] is an extraordinarily observant reader and intelligent commentator, and he offers gems of insight (occasionally encased in academic jargon) on almost every page. Moreover, he has read widely, including in the vast corpus of books and articles that historians have produced. Nevertheless, he has missed a few significant interventions, and his methodological orientation toward textual exegesis sometimes sends him in one-sided, even doctrinaire directions that a more comprehensive approach to the evidence might have forestalled. Is it really fair to say that the West Indies were neglected by British metropolitans during the nineteenth century? Taylor is far too knowledgeable and sophisticated to make...

Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution ed. by Maria O'Malley and Denys Van Renen

Reviewed by: Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution ed. by Maria O'Malley and Denys Van Renen Anna Vincenzi Maria O'Malley and Denys Van Renen, eds., Beyond 1776: Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution (Charlottesville, VA: The Univ. of Virginia Press, 2018). Pp. 272. $45.00 cloth. The "beyond" in this book title has at least three different meanings. The first is geographical. The world of 1776 was one of global interdependencies and cosmopolitanism. As the editors observe, American independence depended on the behavior of other global actors—sometimes very far away actors such as Russia or the Ottoman empire (4). Thus, following in the footsteps of scholars such as Eliga Gould, Claudio Saunt, and Kathleen DuVal, this volume sets out to revisit the foundation of the United States from a global perspective. It carries the reader "beyond" the American Revolution as a "national moment," but also "beyond" the boundaries of the Atlantic and of the British empire, to include, for example, continental Europe (Germany and the Low Countries), the Dutch West Indian colony of St. Eustatius, and China. By doing so, the volume offers a valuable contribution to the mission of achieving a "vaster" perspective on Early America and the Revolution. The volume also aims to go "beyond" traditional methodologies, moving away from canonical sources, actors, and research approaches to the Revolution and its impact abroad. The authors suggest that German-language literature circulating in the early republic or the relatively obscure Mennonite preacher Herman Husband (1724–1795) can reveal nuances of the Revolution that focusing exclusively on Common Sense and the Founding Fathers does not. When the Founders do appear in the volume—as Benjamin Franklin in Maria O'Malley's essay—it as canny, sneaky, and unglorified. Or, to give another example, Carine Louinissi's essay investigates a classic topic, the American Revolution's influence on pre-Revolutionary France, but does so through the eyes of non-canonical interpreters: instead of the usual Brissot, Condorcet, and Raynal, she chooses to focus on lesser-known French intellectuals. "Beyond" is also a value judgment. The essays in many ways relativize the importance of 1776. For starters, there is almost no 1776 in the book. Most essays deal with sources from the 1790s or the nineteenth century. Several essays witness to the impact that foreign events—the French Revolution above all—had on foreign and domestic interpretations of the American Revolution. Leonard von Morzé, for example, examines two 1800 and 1815 pamphlets by the German immigrant Jacob Hütter (1771–1849), showing how his changing perceptions of the French Revolution also prompted his reading of the American Revolution to evolve. Similarly, Miranda Green-Barteet's study of Sarah Pogson's play The Female Enthusiast (1807) documents how the French Revolution shaped Pogson's reflections on the relationship between nationhood and motherhood in the early republic. But other contributions show that elsewhere the American Revolution went unnoticed for much longer. In China, the American Revolution only became a topic of discussion at the turn of the twentieth century. A drastic radicalization of Chinese politics—with the emergence of an anti-Manchurian independence movement in Taiwan and of revolutionary republican societies in mainland China—prompted Chinese people to look back to the American example. Overall, then, what this volume suggests is that 1776 needed other, foreign, events to become 1776, to take up the value of historical milestone that the public [End Page 141] attributes to it today. At the time, instead, peoples around the globe did not attribute to the Revolution universal significance or univocal meaning. The transnational impact of the American Revolution was contingent and diverse, depending on the particular interests of each local community. Paying attention to these local variations and contingent contexts proves fruitful in another way. It discloses a variety of paths-not-taken, missed opportunities, and perspectives on the Age of Revolutions that traditional narratives and Whiggish teleology tend to obscure. For example, Louinissi's essay accounts for the fact that some French intellectuals did not transform their support for the American Revolution into appeals for revolution, remaining moderate reformists or royalists until the beginning of the French Revolution, and sometimes...

The Bahamas in International Intrigue: Lighthouses and Cay Sal Bank

By the early 19th century after a series of wars with France, Spain and the United States of America, Britain jealously guarded every inch of her West Indian colonies. The United States of America’s request for cession of strategic plots of land in The Bahamas for lighthouses was considered by Britain with mistrust. Relations between Britain and its former colony had been strained since the War of Independence and the War of 1812. The ideology of the Monroe Doctrine sought to expand United States territory and economic power but Britain did not want that expansion to be into her sovereign territory. Of further concern to Britain was that one of the areas requested, the Cay Sal Bank, of strategic importance to the United States of America, was at the time contentiously claimed by both the British colony of The Bahamas and the Spanish colony of Cuba.

Sustaining Faith

Abstract This article uses the case study of the small Quaker community on seventeenth-century Antigua, as well as sources from Quakers on Barbados and from Quaker missionaries travelling throughout Britain’s Atlantic empire, to question the role of Quakers as anti-slavery pioneers. Quaker founder George Fox used a paternalistic formulation of hierarchy to contend that enslavement of other human beings was compatible with Quakerism, so long as it was done in a nurturing way—an argument that was especially compelling given the sect’s desperate need in the seventeenth century to establish itself economically or risk its destruction by the post-Restoration British State. By exploring the crucial economic role that the slave-based economies of the West Indies played in establishing the Quakers as a powerful sect in the eighteenth-century North American colonies, this article demonstrates that it was impossible for Quakers to follow through in establishing a nurturing form of slavery, particularly within the brutal context of the West Indian sugar colonies.

‘Exhibits with real colour and interest’: representations of the West India Regiment at Atlantic World’s Fairs

ABSTRACTBeyond their role in expanding and securing the British Empire, the West India Regiments (WIRs) were used to sell the Caribbean region to tourists and potential investors. Soldiers travelled in person and in photographic form to numerous world’s fairs that brought the empire to London and major American cities such as Chicago and New Orleans. Through their representation at these events their likeness, and in some cases their actual physical presence, was showcased to a range of audiences who did not have to venture outside of their home countries for the experience. For nations such as Britain, who controlled vast empires, the fairs provided a justification for empire by showcasing the lack of development of some native peoples and the advancement of others under colonial rule through human exhibits. The WIRs were used as key examples of this progress and decorated promotional stands related to the West Indian colonies, unlike representatives of African ethnic groups who were used to populate constructed ‘native villages’.

The amelioration of British West Indian slavery: anthropometric evidence

AbstractAn older view among historians, predominant until about 1970, held that British West Indian slave maintenance standards were significantly improved or ‘ameliorated’ from the later eighteenth century. Subsequent research has disputed this consensus, although uncertainty remains on key details of slave diet, labour, and demography. As an alternative welfare measure, this study examines the reported heights of detained runaway slaves and ex‐slaves held between 1788 and 1838 at workhouses on Jamaica, the most important British West Indian colony. Analytical challenges arise through the limited age data. Also, a disproportionate share of the detainees had an urban background. However, these problems can be overcome with help from local estate records and from eastern Caribbean anthropometric evidence. The mean stature of Jamaica‐born adult detainees clearly rose during the period, and they gained a widening height advantage relative to their Africa‐born counterparts. This offers a useful indicator of trends for the enslaved population at large. The workhouse material confirms ‘old school’ judgements that substantive amelioration occurred, as a course of deliberate slaveholder policy.

Cultivated for Consumption: Botany, Colonial Cannibalism, and National/Natural History in Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl

This essay argues that Sydney Owenson employs botanical imagery in her novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), to represent many facets of Irish colonialism as well as the 1800 Act of Union that formed the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Depicting the Irish as metaphorical plants, as food for England’s “body politic,” Owenson gestures toward a symbolic cannibalism as just one form of England’s colonial consumption of Ireland within the novel, and highlights this notion further through comparisons between the Irish peasantry and African slaves in the West Indian colonies. Melding ideas of science and sensibility, as well as natural history and national history, Owenson subtly exposes England’s exploitation of Ireland in this Act of Union.

The Mechanical Plantation: Picturing Sugar Production in the Encyclopédie

The Mechanical Plantation: Picturing Sugar Production in the Encyclopédie Susan H. Libby (bio) Among the eighty-three illustrations of agriculture in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie are several depicting colonial plantations.1 Grouped together in a section titled “Economie et Agriculture Rustique,” scenes of tobacco, indigo, cotton, and sugar production appear among images of domestic agriculture, such as plowing, caring for grapevines, and making hemp. The colonial agriculture takes place on island plantations, except for tobacco, where the location is not indicated. A reader viewing this section sees a succession of illustrations of familiar rural activities occurring in a temperate region, interrupted by a few scenes taking place in the tropics, as if the latter were simply topographical variations of the French landscape, and not over 4,000 miles from France’s west coast. Visually locating the West Indian colonies as if they were attached to France is one of many pictorial devices that served to normalize, indeed promote, France’s colonial ambitions by figuring plantation agriculture as a productive, efficient and rational method of exploiting human and constructed technologies for the benefit of the French economy. These qualities are amplified by the images’ emphasis on mechanical processes through detailed, close-up views of tools and machines that drive the organization of labor, that are typical of all of the Encyclopédie’s illustrations of labor. Although [End Page 71] the plantation images do not function entirely independently of articles in the text volumes, and figure as parts of a thematic collection, they act as a discrete visual information system, communicating the philosophes’ essentially favorable views on colonialism, and by extension, on slavery, in ways that texts cannot. Scholarship on the Encyclopédie illustrations has paid some attention to the agricultural illustrations but very little to the plantation scenes.2 In what follows, my aim is to show how these images portrayed colonialism as a desirable and financially viable enterprise for the French nation as it sought to recover from the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The volume that included the agricultura; series was published in 1762 after six years of conflict with Britain, during which time France had lost Quebec and other parts of New France in North America, as well as its forts in Senegal and territory in India. For a time, France had also lost most of its Caribbean colonies to the British, although Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe were regained by 1763.3 The damage to the French economy was devastating, and by 1760, the country was nearly bankrupt.4 The 1763 Treaty of Paris left France with its most valuable Caribbean colonies but without most of its North American possessions. I do not suggest that the images were intentionally published when they were for the explicit purpose of responding to the war, but given the effects of the conflict, the appearance of the colonies as securely linked to French soil would surely have conveyed the idea that increased investment in large-scale, mechanized monoculture plantations would restore France’s stability, and more importantly, would secure them for the nation. I approach these images in terms of what Jill H. Casid calls “plantation as discourse.”5 Connecting representation and practice, she writes, “…the colonial landscape was planted and replanted not only through successive eras of colonial plantation but through forms of reproductive print, visual and textual, that were to serve as prototypical models of colonial relandscaping[;]…printed views, diagrams, maps, and plans … acted primarily as vehicles for the dissemination and production of imperial power, whether in the beneficent guise of…landscape or the abstracted geometry of machinic drafting.”6 I contend that the Encyclopédie’s plantation scenes, as images circulating among the other prints, views, and texts mentioned above, similarly performed the work of spreading colonialist aims. Moreover, as descriptions of occupations and labor (the “arts et métiers” of the Encyclopédie), they fetishize technology, to the point where they figure the colonial plantation in its entirety as a perfectly synchronized machine. [End Page 72] In what follows, I briefly provide background on the Encyclopédie’s publication chronology and address the illustrations’ visual properties and organization. I then turn...

The ‘White Man’s Game’? West Indian Cricket Tours of the 1900s

The 1900s saw two tours of the United Kingdom (UK) by a mixed race cricket team representing the West Indies. This paper argues that the tours were part of a concerted cultural campaign largely organized by the West India Committee to raise the profile of the British West Indian colonies in the Mother Country in the light of competition for favour among the settler colonies. It analyzes the selection of the team and its reception in the UK to argue that the existing literature has been mistaken in portraying the team to have been subject to consistent hostility due to the inclusion of black players in the touring party. Rather it is argued that the team of 1900 was largely welcomed as a truly representative West Indian team but that by 1906 a tightening of the definition of who could represent the empire on the sports field, influenced by the settlement of the South Africa War, meant that mixed race cricket would be rejected and the West Indians unjustly excluded from the Imperial Cricket Conference, which became an all whites club.

Domestic slave trading in St. Croix, 1764–1848

This article deals with domestic slave trading in the Danish (-Norwegian) West Indian colony of St. Croix, focusing on enslaved labourers sold as chattel. It examines the volume and price developments, building upon data on thousands of sales. Crucian slaveholders were willing participants in the domestic slave market, especially during the market’s peak period, c. 1767–1823. Some of them did make a profit from speculation, although evidence of large-scale, professional entrepreneurs is absent. The closing of the transatlantic slave trade did not lead to rising slave prices in the short term, but in the long run it was an important factor in the decline of the market. Finally, the article discusses the impact of the market on enslaved Crucians and their masters, as well as their respective strategies for dealing with it.

Why Black Homeowners are More Likely to Be Caribbean-American than African-American in New York: A Theory of How Early West Indian Migrants Broke Racial Cartels in Housing

Why are the black brownstone owners in Harlem and Brooklyn disproportionately West Indian? The landlords, West Indian-American? The tenants African-American? These are tough questions. For students of housing discrimination, West Indian Americans have long presented a quandary. If it is reasonable to assume that racial exclusions are being consistently applied to persons who are dark-skinned, one would expect to find that housing discrimination has had similar effects on West Indian-Americans and African-Americans. Yet this is not the case: West Indian-Americans generally own and rent higher quality housing than African-Americans. Moreover, these advantages began long ago. For example, when racial covenants, that is, restrictions barring racial and ethnic groups from owning real property in particular neighborhoods were rife in New York, they were not consistently applied against West Indians, who were sometimes able to buy into tony neighborhoods. While it is true that such covenants were also inconsistently applied against other ethnic and religious groups such as Jewish New Yorkers, West-Indians still stand out. Since West Indians are overwhelmingly dark-skinned persons of African descent they typically did not have the option of passing that may have been available to other groups. Eschewing more traditional explanations in the civil rights literature, I apply the literature in which racial segregation in real property ownership is conceived as a racial monopoly in which racial cartels appropriate anti-competitive techniques to monopolize access to real property. Maintaining a racial cartel is dependent on white owners maintaining a united front, that is, they must uniformly refuse to sell. Importantly, realtors play a gate keeping role in real estate and West Indians dominated the realtor sector. As realtors, they were expert at finding defectors, namely, whites willing to break norms of racial exclusivity, in exchange for their ability to extract a premium for selling to blacks early. Brokers then proceeded to buy significant numbers of titles, which were then off-loaded to fellow West Indians. West Indian brokers could act in confidence because they had cash-rich clients and were often buying in trust (de facto if not de jure) for fellow West Indians. In so doing, West Indian brokers in New York were simply replicating techniques that had been utilized by their land-brokering ancestors. I discuss the history that previews this period in New York, albeit in a different context: in the British West Indian islands from the migrants originated. There are repeated instances of blacks busting white monopolies in land-ownership, throughout the West Indian colonies in contravention of racial norms in the British colonies of who was allowed to own land where. Upon arrival in New York, West Indians encountered another racial monopoly in real property ownership, namely Northern racial segregation. They essentially appropriated the same techniques that they had utilized in the West Indies to break into white neighborhoods in New York.

Why Quality Mattered: A Case Study Using Ceramics from the French West Indian Colony of Guadeloupe

Quality, as well as other important factors, such as the prices of goods, influenced the consumption patterns of early modern consumers,. The concept of quality can be useful to archaeologists who study material culture and desire a closer understanding of the consumers’ experience. This article presents an analysis of ceramic quality during the 18th century in Guadeloupe, a French colony in the West Indies. The data come from four colonial sites excavated in Basse-Terre, the historic capital, and from probate inventories. The attributes of ceramics that are related to their quality are examined in detail. These include their origin, their value from appraisals in the inventories, and some details about their decoration or style. Analyzing these attributes and comparing the data from the inventories with the archaeological collections yields insights into the importance of quality in Guadeloupe and how quality was defined by local consumers, with a particular focus on the creole elite. The results also suggest that understanding the ways social actors defined quality in the past can enhance artifact classification and archaeological analyses.