This chapter, the first to our knowledge, examines whether central banks in Caribbean small island states have the necessary legal and institutional frameworks to achieve the global central banking community’s pledge to contribute to net-zero and safeguard financial stability from climate change. We find that the legal mandates of the central banks studied do not extend to climate change or sustainability. However, climate-related risks, if qualified as financial risks, fall within their financial stability mandate. Further, the path to net-zero is limited by the existing internal capacity of central banks, which is not geared towards climate science. This is not surprising since climate change has fairly recently moved beyond the acceptable risk tolerance of central banks, and only now is a response being fashioned. We argue that the region faces a high boundary risk with respect to net-zero. We note that even if Caribbean central banks are equipped with a mandate and policy tools to address climate change, net-zero may still not be achievable where climate change public policies are absent or not fully articulated. Further, Caribbean economies carry a heavy weighting to climate-sensitive or carbon-relevant sectors. Hence, net-zero may only be achieved with the involvement of committed governments.

This chapter offers a close analysis of the Uniformitarian Principle and its use as a conceptual tool for understanding and narrating language contact and language change, paying special attention to the social life of Anguillian, the English-lexifier Creole language of Anguilla, the most northerly of the Caribbean’s Leeward Islands. The language and aspects of the situation of contact that led to its emergence are described from a novel uniformitarian perspective that integrates insights from general linguistics, Communication Accommodation Theory, and the analysis of early colonial-era archives.

This chapter examines the case of María Geronima, an Iberian-born, free-Black woman who lived in Cartagena, Veracruz, and Mexico City before she was exiled to Cuba in 1636. In emphasizing Geronima’s remarkable mobility, the chapter asks how inchoate notions of caste, race, and community varied and transformed across space in the early modern world. In Geronima’s exile from New Spain, the chapter ultimately asks whether and how scholars can apply Mexico’s archival richness—as seen in cases such as Geronima’s—to understand the evolution and function of status elsewhere in the Atlantic world.

Traditionally, scholars have focused on how narratives of the lives of the enslaved, commonly understood as “slave narratives,” engaged with explicit claims to authenticity and authority as distinct from those of the novel genre that developed coterminously. Indeed, scholars of the slave narrative have frequently focused almost exclusively on the discursive foundations and frameworks of abolitionism. To solely focus on whether or not a narrative is “true or authentic” is to accept that narratives of the lives of the enslaved can only ever be political ethnography, as opposed to aesthetics. However, like others, enslaved and free Black narrators drew heavily upon engagements with notions of subjectivity and social action that appeared in other genres such as poetry and the novel. And so, consequently, rather than understanding the slave narrative as a genre that is focused solely on the institution of enslavement, we have instead a complex genre that is in dynamic conversation with other institutions, concepts, discourses, and genres. In addition to acknowledging how subaltern groups appropriated other forms of discourse, this chapter will examine how these inherently hybrid and complex texts participated directly and dynamically within discussions of identity, nation, and empire, as well as slavery.

While many Black Caribbean British writers persisted in operating within the literary framework of the empire, they blended an African Caribbean style and a Black diaspora perspective to enhance their literary activism. Developing a distinct style, later-generation writers asserted their presence in British society. Their thematic concerns went beyond the struggle for belonging or the need to establish a new Caribbean identity in a foreign environment. Further, as exemplified by poets such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, their works reflected a thread of resistance against British cultural imperialism and institutionalized racism. Although identity and self-determination continued to resonate deeply within the literature of Black Caribbean British writers, a shift occurred in the newer generation. Departing from biographical narratives, they explored diverse political and social themes while using a range of genre fiction to convey emerging complexities. The first part of the chapter critically analyses the legacies and continuities of the African Caribbean writing style. The second section examines the Black diaspora sensibility, showing how post-1990s Black Caribbean British writers engaged in critical analysis of the intricate intersections of race, gender issues, and sexuality through contemporary literary styles.

The introduction explains how the Eastern Amazon was shaped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; this means appreciating the diverse spaces and peoples of the Amazon and how they define one another. The introduction shows how this approach re-centres the Amazon as part of a continental space and elucidates its role in continental history by analysing the historical agency of the people who inhabited the region. Sections make the theoretical and methodological justification for analytically joining up the spaces and territories that are historically considered separate. It discusses the use of a spatial history approach, and how this perspective contributes to a new understanding of the Amazon, and presents a revisionist and historically anthropological framing of the argument along definitions of keywords used in the book.

Chapter 4.1, "What’s In it For Us? A Case of Interest Convergence" highlights the CRT tenet of interest convergence, the self-interest of dominant, powerful groups. This has implications for the way programs and policies that benefit minoritized groups are implemented. This tenet asks critical questions about all areas of practice, including humanitarian work in international settings. Unless international assistance programs understand and incorporate the community’s culture, needs, and input into its efforts, it could have a negative effect on the community and work being done. Acknowledging this through a CRT lens of interest convergence can ensure that the needs of minoritized groups are given priority, otherwise efforts put in place to advance them may not be effective.

This chapter opens by establishing the tangible personal connections between writers and intellectuals in Africa and the Caribbean. By way of these networks, African print made its way into Caribbean publications. It then identifies some of the styles and genres of African writing produced in the Caribbean. Next, we use the example of Jamaica to consider the differing networks print media followed into and through the diaspora during the mid-twentieth century. Pan-Africanist textual networks were less neat and more diverse than scholars have generally recognised, and prominently involved the lower socio-economic classes. In a country with a largely illiterate population, Jamaicans both accessed and consumed mainstream newspapers, smaller newsletters and journals in a distinct way. Jamaica had a culture of literature but not a literate culture where the written word intersected with and percolated through oral debates. The travels of African writing, we argue, suggest that conceptually African literatures (versus African literature) encompassed the African diaspora in concrete ways.

Britons and British subjects with family members deeply involved in the transatlantic economy were an important feature of University life. These students, who grew in number due the increasing profits of the slave economy and the underdeveloped state of tertiary education in the colonies, were accepted and nurtured by fellows and masters who, in many cases, owned plantations, held investments in the slave trade, or had family members serving as governors in the North American colonies. In following the experiences of these students, the chapter details the lives and struggles of undergraduates, particularly those who traveled abroad to Cambridge, and the emotional and personal bonds that fellows and their young charges developed. The chapter is a reminder that, when considering institutional connections to enslavement, political economy was but one side of the story – the emotional, social, and cultural bonds between the sons of enslavers and their fellow Britons were also integral.

This chapter explores the stories of urban and rural protesters, female boycotters and spinners, Black rebels and runaways, and Indigenous combatants who engaged in protests, boycotts, and mob action to assert their political and personal legitimacy on the eve of the American Revolution. The study of material culture demonstrates that the quest for liberty became central to American life through things; objects ranging from the mundane to the elite made the lofty, abstract goals of political protest tangible to men and women throughout the British colonies. Physical artifacts – whether built spaces, printed visuals, homespun fabrics, seized cargo, or tokens of war – illustrated a convergence of material culture and collective action in the 1760s and 1770s. The material culture and performance of protest played an important role in fueling the social and political unrest that pushed the colonies toward revolution.

This chapter focuses on an alleged rebellion by enslaved people in Jamaica in 1776. A broader global perspective on the American Revolution, one beyond the thirteen rebelling mainland colonies, underlines how freedom and unfreedom intertwined together in complicated, surprising, and sometimes horrific ways in 1776. The chapter argues that calls for liberty on the mainland tightened the noose of slavery in the Caribbean. In Jamaica, the American Revolution gave even more force to already powerful waves of racist fear and violence, making dismal slavery even grimmer. Enslaver anxieties centered on control of arms and violence against white women. Moreover, what happened in Jamaica affected the course and shape of the American Revolution. The events of 1776 in Jamaica also highlight that the Age of Revolutions was equally an age of racism and retrenchment as it was one of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The American war, as the War of American Independence was known in Britain, was a highly misleading description; it was much more than just a bilateral struggle between Britain and the rebel colonies that became the United States. Though the conflict began in North America, from when the French intervened in 1778 to support the new states, the war spread to the West Indies, West Africa, South Asia, and the waters off the British Isles. When the Spanish became belligerents in 1779, the geographical reach of the struggle expanded still further, taking in Central America and Britain’s Mediterranean outposts of Gibraltar and Minorca. At the end of 1780, the list of Britain’s enemies extended when the British (rather quixotically) declared war on the Dutch. Dutch possessions in the Caribbean, West Africa and South Asia were drawn into a truly worldwide contest. In all theaters of the war, including in North America, the European belligerents called on the military support of local manpower and the services of other Europeans, making it a transnational as well as a global conflict.

After independence, the United States as a new nation can be said to have “re-encountered” the world from 1787 to 1800. The Treaty of Paris (1784) and the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 meant that it navigated a world it once knew as a new political entity. The United States in its early years forged new relationships or attempted to maintain older ones, hoping to potentially “make the world anew,” while also contending with leftover, unfinished colonial-era business. Although the new nation re-encountering the world beyond its borders constituted the first forays by the United States in the process of becoming a nation with global reach and influence, the process was a long, fraught one. This chapter argues that, though far from being the globalizing power it would subsequently become, the United States put out global feelers while also being globalized at home.

The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

This chapter analyzes how the War for Independence affected Caribbean colonies and how they, in turn, shaped the revolution. It organizes the impact into two moments: before and after the 1778 Franco-American alliance. In the first phase, Patriots turned to the French, Spanish, and Dutch Caribbean for war materiel and, more generally, to fill the economic gap resulting from the break with Britain. Meanwhile, British Caribbean colonies weathered the shocks of North American independence to trade and to preserve their precarious slave societies. After 1778, with the official entrance of European powers into the war, the Caribbean became an active theater of conflict, as all empires looked to protect and to add to West Indian claims. Pressed for more soldiers in this region, some militaries armed Black men, who, through their actions, undercut patriots’ racist basis of freedom – a challenge that reached even fuller fruition during the Haitian Revolution.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.