Caribbean Studies

This paper will provide an overview of the fundamental changes that the cruise ship business has undergone with the emergence of capitalist globalization and in the context of the Caribbean region. Rising profits and investments in tourism during the later decades of the 20th century and into the 21st century have been an important part of the globalizing economy. This has been a consequence of both the major technological and organizational developments of global capitalism, but also, and most importantly, of the global system's changing social and class relations. The shifting social relations and productive activities that undergird the cruise ship business have meant gains for some involved, most especially, transnational capitalists, and exploitative and contradictory dynamics for many others. Annually millions of tourists from high consuming sectors worldwide partake in brief holiday escapes aboard cruise ship vessels. At the same time, the cruise ship business has become an oligopoly, controlled by a handful of large companies, that has driven many competitors out of business or acquiried them. Labor in the business has become more flexibilized, with low-wage workers (from a variety of nationalities) whose activities are increasingly standardized, monitored and micro-managed. While moving away from indicative development planning (with an eye to national goals), state policymakers in the Caribbean, for their own social reproduction, increasingly promote the interests of transnational capital such as with the cruise ship business. Importantly, labor and environmental protections have been stymied as the cruise ship companies, adept at public relations and skirting regulations, remain largely unaccountable.

This article contributes to the reassessment of Scottish history and identity in light of the recovery of its connections with black Atlantic issues such as slavery and empire. The ‘paradox’ of the national bard seeking employment as a book-keeper on Jamaica remains an uncomfortable area for modern Scotland. This article considers Burns's biographical and textual (dis-)entanglement with the Caribbean in relation to the subsequent competition over his memory. It reads Robert Burns as a lieu de mémoire (Pierre Nora) that opens up a conflicted account of the nature of free labour ideology, slavery and abolition in the late eighteenth century.

ABSTRACT
In this paper, we study for the first time the unpublished multilingual poetry written by Sanandrean linguist Oakley Forbes. We also explore his role in
the translation of Juan Ramírez Dawkins’ poems. In these two unknown aspects of Forbes’ life, we trace the relationship between writing and translation
in his double role as translator and self-translator. This study shows that writing and translating are two spheres present both in his role as a translator
of Ramírez Dawkins’ works and as a translator of his own works. When he collaborated with Ramírez Dawkins in the translation of the latter’s works,
he had the freedom to rewrite and to adapt the text in order to re-spatialize it to the writer’s other audience. The same happened with the translation of
his own poetic work, which, being written in several languages, reflects the richness and paradoxes of the encounters of diverse cultures.
Keywords: Oakley Forbes. Collaborative Translation. Self-translation. Caribbean Poetry. Literary multilingualism.

I revisit Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” just weeks after the largest triple hurricane system on record has pummeled the Caribbean. It is an awful reminder of the permeability between land and sea, particularly in small islands. In this unholy trinity of Irma, José, and Maria, these mergers are violent and deadly. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared that Barbuda, thought to have been 90% destroyed (like Anguilla) by Hurricane Irma, became a "paradise transformed to hell." The category 5 Hurricane Maria, which destroyed the fresh water supply and infrastructure in Dominica and Puerto Rico, was thought to be the strongest Atlantic storm on record. Hurricane Irma flooded seawater as far as a third of a mile inland in Cuba. Beach sand covered the region’s major arteries, which are still unpassable in many places, weeks after the storm. Twenty-five foot waves pounded the shores, while coastal surges were measured at over six feet in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Due to the record-breaking levels of rain, an 11-billion gallon dam in Puerto Rico began to fail. Irma’s winds were so strong they literally pulled water out of the ocean and dried out beaches in the Bahamas and created watery bulges elsewhere.  In report after eyewitness report the language to encapsulate these unprecedented violent weather events fails. Instead the language of apocalypse prevails to describe what is “catrastrophic,” “precarious,” “total devastation,” and “hell.”

Glocal Spirituality:  Consumerism and Heritage in Puerto Rican Brujería
With the recent intensification of the circulation of ritual experts and commodities, folk religions such as Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing) have entered a transnational arena of ritual experimentation and eclecticism. Concomitantly, the politics of identity, operating at local-political and global-commercial stages, propel the search for origins and the production of essential identities, leading to the revitalization and orthodoxy of folk religions as well as their folklorization, following a local—though globally pervasive—heritage discourse.  Why glocal spirituality? My main argument is that both these forces—the actual insertion into global circulations that promote a high degree of ritual eclecticism and the local demand for an essential Puerto Rican national identity that promote orthodoxy—work in tandem creating a complex set of conditions for ritual practice and meaning.
How can these apparently contradictory processes be theorized within folklore studies? From a historic-pragmatic perspective to ritual and through an intimate ethnographic account that traces the encounters between practitioners, clients and suppliers of ritual goods, I will show how these two processes work in tandem. That is, without an a-priori public recognition of brujos (witch-healers) as repositories of Puerto Rican wisdom (in the context of the unresolved neocolonial political status of the island), the fame and celebrity that enabled the open incorporation of African based rituals, of bureaucratic gestures and interventions, and transnational religious commodities could not have been viable. Critics of the culture industry and consumerism tend to suggest that commercial forces inherently taint the authenticity of culture, and in this case would taint the spiritual effectiveness of brujería. For practitioners and clients, however, material and spiritual progress not only are not at odds but also are intimately connected. Indeed, practitioners are driven by the attainment of “blessings”—defined by material success as well as spiritual power—which presume the spirituality of commodities and the thinghood of spirituality. Especially in a world guided by capitalist modes of production and the sensuous insatiable consumption of life styles and self-images, brujos and their clients take advantage of the opportunities opened up by multiculturalism and identity politics. They openly expand the pantheon of spirits as well as their ritual expertise, protected by the idiom of heritage—yet outside of its constraints, showing that more than endangered species they are active participants in these glocal forces, speaking to them in their own particular modern yet spiritual idiom.

The Oceanic Turn: We are witnessing an interdisciplinary transition to what might be called " critical ocean studies " that reflects an important shift from a long-term concern with mobility across transoceanic surfaces to theorizing oceanic submersion, thus rendering vast oceanic space into ontological place. This has much to do with a new oceanic imaginary emerging in the wake of the knowledge of anthropogenic climate change and sea-level rise. This turn to ontologies of the sea and its multispe-cies engagements are the focus of this paper, particularly their implications for temporality and aesthetics in the Anthropocene. The oceanic turn of the twentieth century issued from geopolitics as well as new interdisciplinary groupings in the humanities and social sciences. It can be traced to the 1945 Truman Proclamation — the most significant, and yet largely unre-marked, twentieth-century remapping of the globe — which extended U.S. territory to include a two-hundred nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (see DeLoughrey, Routes). This created a scramble for the oceans, catalyzing EEZ declarations by nations all over the world and a U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea that effectively remapped seventy percent of the planet. Although largely unnoticed by new disciplinary groupings such as the " Blue Humanities " (Mentz), Cold War geopolitics had a decisive influence in configuring a new understanding of the terraqueous globe. The second catalyst for the rise of critical ocean studies was the post-1970s " spatial turn, " which led to the emergence of globalization and diaspora studies. Marx-ist geography was integral to defining the post-Fordist era of global capitalism and relations of labor to space. This loosening of nationally-bounded modes of thinking about capital and space led to an unprecedented number of transoceanic studies, notably the work of Marcus Rediker, which helped to inspire Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, a text that inaugurated a new generation of thinking about race in transoceanic ways.

If, according to turn-of-the-twentieth-century observers, black Puerto Ricans were destined to become racially white in a few generations, how did 12.4 per cent of the population manage to remain black in 2010? And how did they survive in the face of both national and everyday forms of racism? How is the persistence and even increase in black identity in Puerto Rico supported? This article argues that there is a covert and largely unexplored social current at work in regard to how black Puerto Ricans live and reproduce their blackness. This is the desire to maintain and celebrate blackness. Using ethnographic data gathered during nearly two decades, the article illustrate that many Puerto Ricans have chosen not to engage in blanqueamiento, instead affirming their blackness, marrying within their communities, and valuing their own cultural practices and beliefs.

El Puerto Rico de Operación Manos a la Obra, el de “lo mejor de los dos mundos”, colapsó. La institucionalidad del Estado Libre Asociado fue abolida de dos plumazos: el caso ELA versus Sánchez Valle y la ley PROMESA. El cuadro de colapso se completa con la depresión económica más larga de la historia, “la gran depresión de los 2000”, y la devastación causada por los huracanes Irma y María. En julio de 2019, luego de catorce días de protesta continua y creciente, el gobernador más corrupto de la historia renunció. La pérdida de toda legitimidad de la kakistocracia presagia el colapso de la partidocracia. Puerto Rico está en ruinas y al garete; no hay otro modo de describir el cómo y el dónde nos encontramos en este momento histórico.

For Puerto Ricans, World War I provided the opportunity to test and challenge the linkages between military service, manhood, citizenship and decolonization.  During the war Puerto Rican political leaders, elected officials, and opinion makers sought to advance the socio-economic and political standing of their communities by demanding access to, and encouraging participation in the U.S. military.  In particular, Puerto Rican elites were interested in mobilizing the Puerto Rican peasantry thinking that training would transform them into modern men worthy of self-determination in the eyes of the metropolis.

"Vienna’s Museum für Vökerkunde holds in its collections a rare sixteenth-century Taíno cotton
belt from Hispaniola (today’s Dominican Republic/Haiti) – one of only two surviving Taíno
cotton artefacts to feature European ‘exotics’, including mirrors, jet beads and brass. This complex
woven structure – a wearable work of art – offers a rare window on to one of the most prestigious
of Taı´no valuables, a personal ornament that literally wrapped the wearer in wealth, status and
spiritual power. The paper charts the original context and use of Taı´no belts, and provides a
detailed account of the Vienna belt’s collection history, its construction and its chronological
placement (radiocarbon-dated using accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) to AD 1475–1635). The
question of how and when the European materials were incorporated into the belt is explored,
critically engaging the entangled histories of association between the two."

Jacqueline Bishop's celebrated piece Tristes Tropique I (2013), exhibited in the 2014 Jamaican Biennale, is part of the artist's larger engagement with the utopic and the dsytopic, the local and the global, the image and the gaze, in representations of the island of Jamaica. In this piece, Bishop restructures and recasts portraiture as a means to engage with nature and the naturalistic in order to dialogue concerning the authorship of Caribbean subjectivity. This work is an interposition between the two parts of Bishop's A View from Afar series that I call Landscapes: Jamaica (2010-ongoing) and the Dudus Chronicles (2011), which together represent a juxtapo-sition of the different Jamaicas she depicts in her work. Bishop's artscapes sit in the midst of dialogic engagement between the rural and urban contexts in Jamaican society; between the gaze up close and the romantic gaze from afar; between a sense of outsiderness and insiderness, but always in a space of belonging to an island that is rimmed and defined by racialized capitalism, a legacy of colonial disequity, touristic dreams and delusions, and violent social relations that spring from its inability to reconfigure its broken economical terrain. In effect, these artscapes allow for art and politics , the abstract and the material, the analytical and the activist, to commingle and resonate through processes of unsettling accepted suppositions, conceptualizations, narratives, and edicts. Tristes Tropique is an obvious invocation of Claude Levi-Strauss's (1955/1961) famous text, and Bishop uses the title as an evocative reminder of the melancholy and distress that undergirds Caribbean life. Levi-Strauss's work is a memoir that also becomes an ironic critique of the impact of human exegesis in forms of domination and exoticism under the prism of tourism, travel, and study. With this particular image, Bishop, like Levi-Strauss, creates a self-reflexive work that imbricates the fragility of the ecology and the place of Jamaicans within the narratology of Island life. This work, measuring 50.8 cm x 25.4 cm, is part of a new, ongoing photographic series by Bishop. The work is formed out of ripped, jagged photographs, pieced back together in odd, asymmetrical patterns, and in the midst stands a black-and-white image of a child surrounded by a mix-match of tropicality, a testament to people who are often unseen and a place that is so paradoxical. However, it is very much representative of how Bishop generates her own aesthetic form in her use of the techniques of intermedia, bricolage, and collaging, which I call "patchwork aesthetics, " a form which Bishop says derives from her foremothers who were visual artists. In Tristes Tropique I, Bishop builds on Levi-Strauss's critique of how the indigenous are misinterpreted and elided from Western narratives by simultaneously interpolating her ancestral connect-edness in the mixed media she employs and by creating a different subject view that emanates from within the photograph, welling from an iris that gently overlays, but does not obscure, the black-and-white image of the child. The outer portions of the photograph are scenes of nature, the lushness of the bush, with a ring of bright pink bougainvillea across the top; the child-a studio portrait of Jacqueline Bishop herself-sits in its midst outlined by the shape of an eye, with its looming iris (Fig. 1). Only the lower half of the child's face is seen, along with her upper torso; her eyes are obscured by the bougainvillea that blocks her view, but since she is placed in the middle of the iris, she implicates the gaze facing her. This would normally control her representation. Here, it does not. In effect, Bishop creates a visual doubling of the gaze from inside the photograph and the perception from the viewer outside that allows for a reinscription of Jamaican subjectivity. The external perspective, in looking at the photograph, may have dismissed

Notes on the Journey toward the Future: Négritude, Abject Blackness, and the Emancipatory Force of Spectrality
Patricia M. Northover and Michaeline A. Crichlow
Abstract

This essay advances an “interpretive analytic” to analyze the character of the politics and strategic intent in Aimé Césaire's poetics and life work. In so doing, it focuses on Césaire's commitment to the method of poetics articulated through the project and politics of négritude. It argues that Césaire's interventions should be treated as part and parcel of the set of cultural practices gathered under the rubric of “creolization” and that his concern is to conduct a “Creole line of escape” from the hegemony of modern cultures of power. The essay teases out the mode of opening that Césaire sought after in “dwelling with power” and eschews a premature closure on his négritude. Certainly, the problem of blackness is implicated in the undoing of the sets of contradictions embedded in our contemporary historical legacy. However, the essay argues that it is the spectral case of “abject blackness” that lies at the heart of Césaire's critique. Given the peculiarity of the conditions sustaining this experience of “being-black-in-the-world,” the essay interprets Césaire's poiesis through an analysis of the aesthetic and aesthetic judgment and within a class of performances called liminal acts.

With Haitian Creole, Albert Valdman breaks new ground in yet another outstanding publication. His many single-authored and multiple-authored books and dictionaries form one of the more influential forces in Haitian Creole and Louisiana Creole linguistics. His Haitian Creole-English Bilingual Dictionary (Valdman et al., 2007) – to cite but one of the many dictionary projects he has directed – is an indispensable reference work in Haitian Creole studies. That dictionary, and now this rich analytical study of Haitian Creole, are great contributions to linguistics and Haitian Creole studies. Both works vastly raise the profile among linguists of this important Caribbean language. The latest addition is also a wonderful resource for graduate and undergraduate students in Haitian studies, provided they have completed at least a handful of courses in linguistics. I used this book on two occasions in an undergraduate introduction to Haitian Creole linguistics and found that, while advanced students grasp the discussions, it is not well suited for inexperienced undergraduates. Courses with large numbers of beginners in the field of linguistics could, however, be assigned shorter passages, a possibility the book makes fully available thanks to its meticulous organization (12 chapters preceded by an introduction).

This article, published on my Korebelief.com blog in May 2018, is about an appeal for a parking fine I was slapped with by Norwich City Council that year.

As the article states, the appeal is "a small part of a program of human rights advocacy I have been pursuing on my own and others’ behalf, in response to a Barbados-sown, globally grown campaign of psychological warfare that has been directed against me for more than half a century".

The words of my appeal provide "a template" of the kind of "human ecology focused activist litigation" I have been developing with the direct and indirect assistance of visual artist Deborah Liversage, the environmental justice litigators Client Earth, the mental health advocacy network Emerging Proud and various other individuals and organizations which, while not inerrant and infallible agents, have much to offer as channels of healing in the world.

I published the appeal in the hope that it would underscore the links between the choices that Barbadians were about to make in the then imminent May 24 general elections on that island (where I was “parked” for a brief period in October 2017) and political and other developments unfolding in England, which has been my “bunker” since July 4th, 2006, when I arrived here as an immigrant.

The article documents my first use of an automotive parking fine as an opportunity to engage with the British legal system in a radically creative way.

I not only make vehicular parking a metaphor for the problem plagued legal status of immigrants in "Brexiting Britain", who like me, are being adversely affected by the UK's "hostile environment" policies. I also make it a metaphor for the transitory nature of words as their meanings change.

The article therefore adds to the broader discourse about language use that I have been developing through my book "The Bible: Beauty and Terror Reconciled" and related human ecology projects.

Fundamentally, it demonstrates the faith based creativity that has been my salvation in the face of the most daunting challenges I have experienced and provides a template for pragmatic, peaceful resistance - an alternative to characteristically violence inducing Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Communist, Capitalist, Feminist and other secular and religious ideological excesses.

It documents

By employing sugar as a social metaphor, whether in narrative foreground or as backdrop, Caribbean writers confronted the oppressive histories and dark human institutions that arose together with the region’s sugar economy.  This proto-metaphor of sugar appealed to the legacy of a generational psychology as much as it did to a contemporary public conscience over the social travail that the industry generated.

In d’bi.young antiafrika’s word! sound! power! a young poet is arrested and tortured by the police on the eve of a Jamaican election. As her interrogators work to extract information from her about a plot to incite revolution, she fights to find the resources to withstand the torture. In her dissociative response to the physical abuse, she makes a journey to the heartland of maroon communities, which symbolize the interior of ancestral Black decolonial struggles from which multiple forms of resistance, including guerrilla wars, were waged against enslavement of the African diaspora. As in this example, d’bi.young antiafrika’s performances and writings remember, celebrate, and interrogate enduring and plural Black and Caribbean radical traditions while also dramatizing a quest for courage and strength to survive, love, struggle, and hold space in the midst of extraordinary violence.

Ford-Smith, Honor. “Performing Queer Marronage: The work of d’bi young anitafrika.” Q2Q: Queer Canadian Performance Texts. Ed. Peter Dickinson, CE Gatchalian, Kathleen Oliver, and Dalbir Singh. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2018. 239-243.

In a place like the Caribbean, we cannot take the agency of portraiture for granted in the aftermath of a much longer history of topographical and anthro-pological representations. .. In the pictorial domain, we are still anthropological, cultural, national, ethnic or electoral commodities and signifiers. We remain labelled but nameless images. The moment of encounter and of exchange is what is at stake. Christopher Cozier, Notes on Wrestling with the Image Cummins / Thompson

The role of military service in spreading the Puerto Rican diaspora is an understudied phenomenon of relevance for understanding the Puerto Rican migration and its settlement patterns in the U.S. Active duty military personnel, veterans, and their families have dispersed the Puerto Rican population beyond what has been considered as traditional centers of Puerto Rican migration.

Life in a Saamaka village is surrounded by rules, from trivial activities such as harvesting fruits to the most formal of public meetings, everything has to be done in the right way, “the way we are used to”. However, these rules seem to be constantly under discussion, there are frequent arguments about which are the rules and how to apply them to each situation. This chapter takes a look at Saamaka politics, trying to understand how deadlocks concerning rules are overcome and how consensus is reached. The main ethnographic are from funerary rituals, activities in which a proper conduct is most important, and thus rules are taken particularly seriously. Brief descriptions of the hierarchy of political offices in Saamaka and the rhetorics in the kuutu (council meetings) will be necessary, in order to understand how authority is conceived and performed, and how rules are established by transforming relationships with the past. The closing arguments contest the recurring description of Maroon polities as “states within a state” and present an alternative approach that takes further into account both Saamaka political philosophy and its inherent relationship with their own style of life.

This newspaper column from 2003 examines how Indians in Trinidad and Tobago are misled, guided by so many fears, the encouragement of feelings of victimhood, and smallness of vision. There is an important contribution for Indians to make to the building of this New World civilisation, which is still in its infancy and only half-made. What is needed is a vision, mission and leadership not griping about “discrimination”, but looking fearlessly to the future.

Yo en el Otro: Wifredo Lam, Gabriel García Márquez & “The Last Journey of the Ghost Ship” (Notes concerning the spiritual in the Art of the Caribbean) is an interpretation of the Caribbean and its Art, based on Kandinsky's analyses on forms and colours (Du Spirituel dans l’art , Concerning the spiritual in art, 1912). It's also a personal celebration of Kandinsky at 150.
" Etenim omnes artes quae ad humanitatem pertinent habent quoddam commune vinculum et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur." -Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta
" Indeed, all the arts which are relevant to humanity have a certain common bond, and are connected, one to another, by a sort of, as it were, kindred relationship." Cicero

Literature & Lithography
(Notes concerning the spiritual in the Art of the Caribbean) Yo en el Otro (the Inner Voice) /dedicated to Chinolope /
  / special thanks to Eskil Lam, for his great help on this project
ABSTRACT
                    “…we must live imaginatively." – Wifredo Lam

In a recent ISJ paper, “Island Archaeology: In Search of a New Horizon”, Boomert and Bright (2007) argue that the field of “island archaeology” should be replaced by an “archaeology of maritime identity”. We disagree and counter that although islands share many physical, biological, and cultural similarities with continental coasts, coastal zones also grade uninterruptedly into riverine, lacustrine, and terrestrial landscapes, raising questions about the validity of their concept of the archaeology of maritime identity. In our view, island archaeology (the application of archaeology to island settings), regardless of past biogeographical underpinnings, has made major contributions to understanding the historical ecology, human impacts, and cultural developments of islands around the world. A focus on islands by archaeologists has encouraged scholars to study the history of island and maritime societies within a comparative framework that is useful for breaking out of the often provincial focus on a single island or archipelago.

The first time I saw one of the sewn fabric masks that have now become so popular during the coronavirus pandemic was not in the United States, where I currently live, but in Venezuela. It was March 2020. My mother-in-law had just gotten internet in her home in a small city in the Venezuelan Andes, and my partner and I were able to have our first video call with her. She told us how a public health official had come to her home, reminding her to get tested at the local clinic free-of-charge, while her neighbor had sewn masks for the entire block. The cloth mask hid her expressions of concern as she asked about our health and the rates of infection in the United States. At that point, my partner was still leaving home to go to work, and I had just been asked to move from in-person to online teaching in the middle of the semester. I immediately developed an upper respiratory infection and dry cough, which was diagnosed as a presumptive case of Covid-19 (presumptive because no testing was available). In Texas, we had been unable to find thermometers, masks, or antiseptic in any nearby pharmacies. While Venezuela faced an ever tightening economic and military blockade by the United States that made no exceptions for medical supplies, masks and tests were already reaching my mother-in-law in her remote town. Why was the response to a public health crisis in the United States, the leader of a global capitalist empire, more uncoordinated and less effective than in a country whose food and medical supplies had been severely compromised?

The answer leads us away from the material facts of medical supplies or national wealth and into the realms of the sacred.

This paper focuses on a sub-watershed within a major watershed that is home to almost one-third of the country’s population.  The watershed area is characterized by being highly vulnerable to flooding during heavy rains, particularly during the hurricane season. The objective of this paper is to formulate policy recommendations that will assist in reducing population vulnerability to flooding and improve/maintain the health of the watershed.

This article performs a strange comparison to question the very applicability of the “burden of proof” to both subaltern mediums and scientists. I look at the problem of proof not only in the field of subaltern spiritual work, but also in the practice of petroleum geology and the history and philosophy of science. By tacking back and forth between “science” and “obeah” in the Caribbean, I hope to problematize the burden of proof that the trials of mediality have often sought to produce – from the experiments with witchcraft in early modern courtrooms to the Victorian trials of psychical research. Might there be other ways of understanding what is at stake in mediumship than the burden of proof?

У статті вперше в українській історіографії аналізується етнічний аспект британської колоніальної політики в Карибському басейні у XVII–XVIII ст. Етнічний розвиток британських карибських колоній є малодослідженою темою в новітній історіографії. Охарактеризовано становище рабів, привезених з Африки. Визначено основні етнічні групи, що сформувалися в Британській Вест-Індії.
Ключові слова: колонія, Карибський басейн, етнос, мулат, креол.

В статье впервые в украинской историографии анализируется этнический аспект британской колониальной политики в Карибском бассейне в XVII–XVIII вв. Этническое развитие британских карибских колоний является малоисследованной темой в новейшей историографии. Охарактеризовано положение рабов, привезенных из Африки. Определены основные этнические группы, сформировавшиеся в Британской Вест-Индии.
Ключевые слова: колония, Карибский бассейн, этнос, мулат, креол.

For the first time in Ukrainian historiography ethnic aspect of British colonial policy in the Caribbean in XVII–XVIII centuries is analyzed in the article. Ethnic development of British Caribbean colonies is insufficiently investigated in modern historiography. Status of slaves brought from Africa is characterized. Main ethnic groups which were formed in the British West Indies are defined.
Keywords: colony, Caribbean, ethnicity, mulatto, Creole.