Suchergebnisse

The migration of indentured Indians from India to the Caribbean -- Indian migration during the indentured period -- Indian migration from the Caribbean to India -- Indian migration within the Caribbean -- Indian migration from the Caribbean to Europe and North America -- Nonindentured Indian migration to the Caribbean since World War II -- Indian identity in the Caribbean -- Conclusion

This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Denmark's solitary experiment with Indian indentured labor on St. Croix during the second half of the nineteenth century. The book focuses on the recruitment, transportation, plantation labor, re-indenture, repatriation, remittances and abolition of Indian indentured experience on the island. In doing so, Roopnarine has produced a compelling narrative on Indian indenture. The laborers challenged and responded accordingly to their daily indentured existence using their cultural strengths to cohere and co-exist in a planter-dominated environment. Laborers had to create opportunities for themselves using their homeland customs without losing the focus that someday they would return home. Indentured Indians understood that the plantation system would not be flexible to them but rather they had to be flexible to plantation system. Roopnarine's concise analysis has moved Indian indenture from the margin to mainstream not only in the historiography of the Danish West Indies, but also in the wider Caribbean where Indians were indentured. Lomarsh Roopnarine is Professor of Caribbean and Latin American History at Jackson State University, USA. He received his PhD in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from the University at Albany, USA and taught at the University of the Virgin Islands, St. Croix. He has published over three dozen articles in Caribbean history, society and environmental policy. He is currently writing a manuscript on Caribbean Indian Migration and Identity.--

Two white ethnic minorities, Jews and Frenchies, are rather unusual in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. The Jews arrived during the period of slavery and participated in the economic colonialism of islands, retaining a prominent position in the Virgin Islands. The Frenchies in St. Thomas arrived from St. Barths after slavery. These white minorities have expanded connections between friends and families as well as in their departed homeland and the Virgin Islands. Their strong religious beliefs and in-group solidarity allowed them to remain in the sociological and economic comfort zones of St. Thomas. In modern times, they have branched out from their insular zones and merged their mores and folkways and their peasant and professional ways, on their gradual terms, with those of other ethnic Virgin Islanders, bringing themselves closer to Virgin Islands society as evidenced by their younger generation.