The Association of Caribbean Historians Elsa Goveia Memorial Book Prize in Caribbean History Winner for 2018/19

The Association of Caribbean Historians has announced Randy Browne's Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean the 2019 winner of the Elsa Goveia Memorial Book Prize.

Browne's book is a human-centred history, covering the period in the immediate aftermath of Berbice's transition from Dutch to British rule, analysing the means by which the enslaved in that colony conducted and negotiated their survival. Browne has utilised a body of primary sources, which hitherto were under-utilised in the study of enslavement, and which those who research slave society and economy of the older plantation economies and societies, such as that of Jamaica and Barbados, could only wish existed. These are the reports of the fiscals and protectors, which cover the period 1819 to 1834, and which include the near verbatim testimonies of thousands of enslaved people, free people of colour and white colonists The only set of sources for the British Caribbean that really comes close to this body are the Stipendiary Magistrates reports which begin with the Apprenticeship period with the formal abolition of slavery.

For although the "voices" of the enslaved are to some extent also filtered here, they are less so, even if provided in a specific juridical context, as they offer unique insights into the negotiation of survival. Browne deftly works through and analyses these layered negotiations in all of their complexities on numerous sugar and coffee producing properties: from the gendered politics of survival, to carving out spaces of spiritual autonomy. The material and the analysis he presents are captivating, and revealing. The only work that comes close to it is Mary Turner's article based on the Fitzherbert Papers for the Blue Mountain and Grange Hill sugar estates in Jamaica which discusses how enslaved people bargained and re-negotiated customary rights whenever a new overseer was appointed, by exploiting his inexperience.

Surviving Slavery goes well beyond this, of course–bringing nuance to the multiple dynamics of power relations among the enslaved class, and between the enslaved and free, with analysis of labour management, exploitation, marital relationships and conflicts, bargaining and challenging labour conditions and customary rights.

This work is therefore an important contribution and expansion of our understanding of the everyday life and world of the enslaved beyond the routine of daily labour and the forms of resistance that have been excavated from plantation journals and other papers. It expands and deepens our understanding of the evolving character of slavery and slave society (white, black, coloured, free and unfree). Indeed, Surviving Slavery offers an important and path-breaking contribution to our under-standing of slave life and experience, in the decades preceding the end of slavery in the British Caribbean.

Peter Hudson's Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean is deserving of Special Mention. A compellingly written history based upon an impressive amount of research, this book provides an original contribution to the history of racial capitalism in the Caribbean. Hudson's mining of family history papers, along with his lyrical style of writing, fashions a remarkable social history of financial institutions such as American Banking Corporation and City Bank of New York, not previously undertaken. His approach to the sources illuminates not only the routes of capitalism, but also the institutional and ideological contexts that encouraged their penetration into the Caribbean in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The second book deserving Special Mention is Elena Schneider's The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade and Slavery in the Atlantic World. This is another work that is beautifully lucid and penetrating, that will, if it has not already, become the definitive account of this key moment in the expansion of plantation Cuba. This well-organized work, it is a multi-imperial study that manages to weave seamlessly the military, social and economic history of Havana. The inter-imperial conflict at the heart of the book, and the ways in which contemporaries made sense of the fluctuating political formations at the time, is a stellar contribution to Caribbean and colonial histories. Given the scope and depth of research, the...