Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
23
result(s) for
"Nevis History."
Sort by:
Sugar cane capitalism and environmental transformation
In this deeply researched and multifaceted study, Marco G. Meniketti demonstrates how the landscape of the small Caribbean island of Nevis preserves and reveals artifacts and evidence of the highly complex and interrelated seventeenth- to nineteenth-century “Atlantic Economy,” comprising early capitalist sugar production, the African slave trade, and European settlement.
Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation is based on twelve seasons of meticulous archaeological field work and documentary research. Although Nevis was once a bustling hub of the British colonial project, the emigration of emancipated slaves and abandonment by European planters left large swathes of Nevis vacant. Reclaimed by forests and undisturbed by later waves of economic development, the island—dotted with fascinating ruins, debris from the sugar industry, windmills, chimneys, and multistoried great house—provided Meniketti with an ideal subject for archaeological inquiry.
Through intensive archaeological and landscape surveys of multiple key plantation sites, Meniketti traces the development of Nevis from its initial European settlement in 1627 to its central role as a British mercantile hub and a laboratory and prototype of capitalist sugar cultivation. His nuanced analysis explains the backdrop of European political and economic rivalries, of which the colonial agro-industrial enterprises were the physical manifestations, and makes telling comparisons with Dutch and French archaeological sites. The work also compares and contrasts the adoption of capitalist modes of sugar production and socialization at wealthy and middling plantation sites.
Supported with a wealth of photos, tables, and maps, Sugar Cane Capitalism and Environmental Transformation offers a vital case study of one island whose environment and archaeological record illuminates the complex webs of Atlantic history.
eBook
A Case in Nevis, 1817
\"A Case in Nevis, 1817\" offers a counter-history of a court case prosecuting an enslaver for cruelty, which occurred on the Caribbean island of Nevis in 1817. It is based on court records, letters, affidavits, and examinations collected by the accused enslaver in an effort to exonerate himself. In this source text, historical silences are legion, but there are fragments in which enslaved people come closely into view. The model of the counter-history attends to the archive of slavery as a form of power as opposed to a collection of facts; indeed, the counter-history is the \"other\" of that power. The narrative tells the story of a family whose members suffered spectacular violence, and it highlights their actions in the aftermath, as they rioted, resisted, and healed in the collective context of their community. We see the plantation as a place always on the edge of riot, a place organized by kinship and collectivity, a place of protest and defiance. Thisbe, Richard, David, Matty, Crissy: the counter-history allows us to shift our historical focus to center them. Not only does it animate and narrate enslaved lives, emphasizing their humanity and particularity, but it also counteracts the forms of power through which those lives were silenced and denied.
Journal Article
Spatially heterogeneous post-Caledonian burial and exhumation across the Scottish Highlands
The postassembly, postrift evolution of passive margins is an essential element of global continental tectonics. Thermal and exhumational histories of passive margins are commonly attributed to a number of drivers, including uplift and erosional retreat of a rift-flank escarpment, intraplate fault reactivation, mantle-driven uplift, and erosional disequilibrium, yet in many cases, a specific factor may appear to dominate the history of a given passive margin. Here, we investigate the complex evolution of passive margins by quantifying exhumation patterns in western Scotland. We build upon the well-studied thermal evolution of the Scottish North Atlantic passive margin to test the importance of spatially heterogeneous factors in driving postorogenic burial and exhumation. Independent investigations of the cooling history from seven different field sites across the western Scottish Highlands using radiogenic apatite helium thermochronometry ([U-Th]/He; n = 14; ca. 31-363 Ma) and thermal modeling confirm that post-Caledonian heating and burial, as well as cooling and exhumation, must have been variable across relatively short distances (i.e., tens of kilometers). Heating associated with Paleogene hotspot activity and rifting locally explains some of this spatial variation, but additional drivers, including margin tilting during rifting, vertical separation along reactivated faults, and nonuniform glacial erosion in the late Cenozoic, are also likely required to produce the observed heterogeneity. These results indicate that passive margins may experience variable burial, uplift, and erosion patterns and histories, without exhibiting a single, dominant driver for behavior before, during, and after rifting.
Journal Article