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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Growing up in Barbados, away from the Caribbean’s major centers of radical state and social experimentation, there was no escaping the excitement of the region in the 1970s and early 1980s. The very air was charged with a sense of possibility that a more humane and people-centered socialist or social democratic path could be forged. In an echo of Grenada’s Fedon Rebellion of 1795, the Grenada Revolution of 1979–1983 brought the turbulence of the age almost next door to Barbados . I had a children’s book extolling the virtues of the revolution, and I thought Maurice Bishop and Fidel Castro extremely handsome and swashbuckling fellows, whereas Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Eugenia Charles, Edward Seaga, and Jean-Claude Duvalier were the devil incarnate. I remember newspaper reports of the final bloody weeks of the People’s Revolutionary Government; the mass killing of one faction of its leadership, including Bishop; and the humiliating U.S. invasion of Grenada on October 25, 1983, when about six thousand U.S. troops occupied a country of one hundred thousand people. Even as a child I experienced an acute sense of embarrassment at the fact that the government of Barbados—my government—provided the regional base from which the invasion was launched. The invasion seriously undermined the regional and intellectual cohesiveness of challenges to the new forms of North American and European imperialism asserting themselves in the era of Britain’s formal exit from much of the region. These memories of the Grenada Revolution—and the relationship of Barbados and Barbadians to it—inspired this study of the impact of the Haitian Revolution and transatlantic abolitionism on Afro-Barbadian politics and community formation in the age of emancipation. This book is about Barbados, a country that still bears (somewhat uncomfortably) the nickname Little England for its perceived topographical similarities and steadfast imperial loyalty to the former metropole. Like England, Barbados has been somewhat insulated from the tides of revolution that periodically have swept its neighbors. Instead, it has been an island from which imperial invasions—whether of Spanish Jamaica in 1655, Grenada in 1983, or Haiti in 1994—often have been launched. And yet I grew up with a very strong sense that Barbadians had a far more ambivalent relationship with empire than the moniker Little England would allow. The study is an effort to make sense of my country’s complicated place within the former British Empire, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic world. Questions I have always had about the social forces that shape the Caribbean’s popular political movements, and the broader regional and transatlantic circuits of Afro-Caribbean radicalism out which the 1979 “Revo” was born, have shaped this book. Hopefully, the book also has something important to say about the English-speaking Caribbean as a whole, a community that, on the surface, can seem as placid as Barbados is supposed to be and yet throughout its modern history has generated popular political movements that have forcefully reminded imperial authorities and local political elites alike that they can never really feel secure in their hold on power. Writing this book would not have been possible without the assistance and in- fluence of a number of individuals and institutions. I thank the Rhodes Trust for providing the scholarship to Oxford University, where I completed the dissertation on which this book is based. Oxford’s Faculty of Modern History and St. Antony ’s College also awarded grants that facilitated research trips to London and Barbados. The University of Toronto provided me with a generous research grant and a teaching leave to complete my writing. I am indebted to my supervisors, Alan Knight and Colin Clarke, for pushing me to produce good work. I will never submit any work for publication without reading it with what I hope are eyes as constructively critical as theirs. I would especially like to thank Jerry Handler, whose influence on this book is obvious to anyone who knows anything about the history of slavery in Barbados, and whose support and friendship have been invaluable since he first met me as a fresh-faced and pretty clueless graduate student in my first month at Oxford. Woodville Marshall has been an inspiration, an example of how to write thorough and meaningful stories about the past and a source of excellent criticism and support, especially as the reader for Louisiana State University Press. Hilary Beckles’s influence also is profound in this book, and I thank...

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