Architecture And Empire In Jamaica

Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author’s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture. Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic.

Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author's own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture. Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic.

An exciting journey to thirteen buildings that capture the essence of the British imperial experience, painting an intimate portrait of the biggest empire the world has ever seen: the people who made it and the people who resisted it, as well as the legacy of the imperial project throughout the world.

Founded in 1769 as a new port town on JamaicaAEs north coast, Falmouth expanded dramatically in the decades around 1800 as it supported the rapidly expanding sugar production of Trelawney and neighboring parishes. Many of the surviving buildings in Falmouth are the townhouses and shops of the planters and merchants who benefitted from the wealth of sugar. That same community also built a major Anglican church and a courthouse, both of which still survive and remain in use. In those same years, the town hosted a growing free-black population and this community also left its mark on the historic town. In 1894, Falmouth received an extraordinary gift from the British crown in the form of the Albert George Market, at once a symbol of persistent colonialism, a shelter for the ancient Sunday markets, and a symbol of modernism in the form of its vast cast iron design. Monuments in the city from the twentieth century include an extraordinary round Catholic church and an impressively Modernist school wing. With little investment through the twentieth century, the town was entirely re-conceptualized in the opening years of the twenty-first century with the construction of a vast cruise ship terminal. Spanning from the foundation of the town in 1769 to the opening of the cruise ship terminal in 2008, this book explores the wide range of architecture built by Jamaicans and others in the making of this extraordinary town.

Victorian Jamaica explores the extraordinary surviving archive of visual representation and material objects to provide a comprehensive account of Jamaican society during Queen Victoria's reign over the British Empire, from 1837 to 1901. In their analyses of material ranging from photographs of plantation laborers and landscape paintings to cricket team photographs, furniture, and architecture, as well as a wide range of texts, the contributors trace the relationship between black Jamaicans and colonial institutions; contextualize race within ritual and performance; and outline how material and visual culture helped shape the complex politics of colonial society. By narrating Victorian history from a Caribbean perspective, this richly illustrated volume—featuring 270 full-color images—offers a complex and nuanced portrait of Jamaica that expands our understanding of the wider history of the British Empire and Atlantic world during this period. Contributors. Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Tim Barringer, Anthony Bogues, David Boxer, Patrick Bryan, Steeve O. Buckridge, Julian Cresser, John M. Cross, Petrina Dacres, Belinda Edmondson, Nadia Ellis, Gillian Forrester, Catherine Hall, Gad Heuman, Rivke Jaffe, O'Neil Lawrence, Erica Moiah James, Jan Marsh, Wayne Modest, Daniel T. Neely, Mark Nesbitt, Diana Paton, Elizabeth Pigou-Dennis, Veerle Poupeye, Jennifer Raab, James Robertson, Shani Roper, Faith Smith, Nicole Smythe-Johnson, Dianne M. Stewart, Krista A. Thompson

Between 1737 and 1746, James Knight—a merchant, planter, and sometime Crown official and legislator in Jamaica—wrote a massive two-volume history of the island. The first volume provided a narrative of the colony’s development up to the mid-1740s, while the second offered a broad survey of most aspects of Jamaican life as it had developed by the third and fourth decades of the eighteenth century. Completed not long before his death in the winter of 1746–47 and held in the British Library, this work is now published for the first time. Well researched and intelligently critical, Knight’s work is not only the most comprehensive account of Jamaica’s ninety years as an English colony ever written; it is also one of the best representations of the provincial mentality as it had emerged in colonial British America between the founding of Virginia and 1750. Expertly edited and introduced by renowned scholar Jack Greene, this volume represents a colonial Caribbean history unique in its contemporary perspective, detail, and scope.

An economic history of the Burton family of Norfolk, and their enslaved workers on the Chiswick sugar estate. While the Atlantic plantation economy covered vast areas of the globe and saw the largest forced movement of people in human history, any global history is the sum of myriad local stories. This book recounts one of them. It is the story of a Norfolk family, the Burtons, who owned the Chiswick sugar estate on the island of Jamaica. The family inherited the estate in 1788 and for fifty-eight years ran it from Norfolk and Suffolk as 'absentee' landlords. Drawing on new archival research in Britain, the United States and Jamaica, this book makes an important intervention to our understanding of key debates in the economic history of plantation slavery: the decline of the planter class, the importance of British abolitionism, the way in which plantations were operated, the mechanics of absentee ownership, and, importantly, the lives of the enslaved people whose exploitation sustained the entire system. Although the story of Chiswick's enslaved workers before the late 1820s is difficult to reconstruct, its traces can be gleaned from the accounting records and letters of the estate's owners. Their story illuminates the economic data and managerial letters and reveals that Chiswick's workers were crucial in shaping the history of the estate. From the 1830s the workers' activity became central, as they responded to emancipation by gradually asserting their rights. In the end, it was the action of the formerly enslaved workers that made the Burtons' continuing ownership of the Chiswick estate economically unviable. While the wider context of abolition made this possible, it was the response of these workers, including strike actions, which decided the fate of the absentee-owned Chiswick sugar estate. RICHARD C. MAGUIRE is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of History, UEA. He is the author of Africans in East Anglia, 1467-1833 (Boydell Press, 2021).

The story of how the country house, historically a site of violent disruption, came to symbolize English stability during the eighteenth century. Country houses are quintessentially English, not only architecturally but also in that they embody national values of continuity and insularity. The English country house, however, has more often been the site of violent disruption than continuous peace. So how is it that the country how came to represent an uncomplicated, nostalgic vision of English history? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the Reformation and Civil War, and shows how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England’s political stability.

Jamaica is famous for its Georgian houses but many people are unaware of the vernacular architecture from which they evolved. Anghelen Phillips illustrates, in her distinctive and peculiar style, a wide and varied range of these buildings from all over the island. Geoffrey Pinto enhances the drawings with a brief history of these buildings, reviewing their current state and looking at the Architectural Heritage Movement in Jamaica in recent years. This third edition is an enduring contribution to the preservation of Jamaica’s architectural heritage and to the foresight to those who conceived and executed it.

Spanning from the West African coast to the Canadian prairies and south to Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Guiana, France's Atlantic empire was one of the largest political entities in the Western Hemisphere. Yet despite France's status as a nation at the forefront of architecture and the structures and designs from this period that still remain, its colonial building program has never been considered on a hemispheric scale. Drawing from hundreds of plans, drawings, photographic field surveys, and extensive archival sources, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire focuses on the French state's and the Catholic Church's ideals and motivations for their urban and architectural projects in the Americas. In vibrant detail, Gauvin Alexander Bailey recreates a world that has been largely destroyed by wars, natural disasters, and fires – from Cap-François (now Cap-Haïtien), which once boasted palaces in the styles of Louis XV and formal gardens patterned after Versailles, to failed utopian cities like Kourou in Guiana. Vividly illustrated with examples of grand buildings, churches, and gardens, as well as simple houses and cottages, this volume also brings to life the architects who built these structures, not only French military engineers and white civilian builders, but also the free people of colour and slaves who contributed so much to the tropical colonies. Taking readers on a historical tour through the striking landmarks of the French colonial landscape, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire presents a sweeping panorama of an entire hemisphere of architecture and its legacy.