This volume is an account of the development and destruction of slavery in St Thomas, St John and St Croix, the Caribbean islands which today comprise the US Virgin Islands. The book sees slavery as fundamental to the entire fabric of colonial society, and pays particular attention to the social and political life of the whites and freedmen in interaction with the slaves.

Language Contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack His Jacket lays bare crucial roles played by community and resistance in the refashioning of heritage languages. Robin Sabino draws on her community relationships, her fieldwork with a last speaker, and research from a range of disciplines, to advance a revisionist history that elucidates the African linguistic resources used to create community in a land those who were transhipped did not choose and from which they could not return. In parallel fashion, the narrative locates the partial appropriation of creole features by the colony’s Euro-Caribbean community in the emergence of local identity. It also traces the replacement of Dutch and Virgin Islands Dutch Creole with their English counterparts. Includes more than 300 unique sound records of the last native speaker.

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.

Through first-hand accounts and loads of illustrations, this slim (and large-print) volume documents the growth of slavery, beginning with the Danes' first efforts at colonization in the early 17th century, to the establishment of a full-blown slave economy, and through the abolition movement in the 19th century. The text is minor, the illustrations great. For a general audience. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

In The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition, Erik Gøbel offers an account of the well-documented Danish transatlantic slave trade. Denmark was the seventh-largest slave-trading nation with forts and factories on the Gold Coast and a colony in the Virgin Islands. The comprehensive Danish archival material provides the basis for Gøbel’s descriptions of the volume and composition of the slave trade and trade cargoes, as well as the shipping and conditions on board along the Middle Passage. Attention is also paid to the 1791 Danish Slave Trade Commission report and the final decision to abolish the slave trade altogether. *The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolitionis now available in paperback for individual customers.

Historians and anthropologists focus on the cultural dimensions of slavery in various geographical and historical settings. They deal with conceptual and theoretical problems in current slavery studies, as well as issues including Native American slaveholding; the integration of former slaves into West African societies; slave life on Caribbean sugar plantations; slave cultures in Suriname; female slave-owners on the Gold Coast; and Maroon communities. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This bibliography of 20th century literature focuses on slavery and slave-trading from ancient times through the 19th century. It contains over 10,000 entries, with the principal sections organizing works by the political/geographical frameworks of the enslavers.

In the first half of the 19th century, the safeguarding of the health of the enslaved workers became a central concern for plantation owners and colonial administrators in the Danish West Indies. With the end of the slave trade, the longstanding excess mortality in the hardworking enslaved population became a crucial problem for the colony because the slaves could no longer be replaced. This book explores the health conditions of the enslaved workers and the health policies initiated by planters and the colonial government. The investigation reveals that, in a comparative Caribbean perspective, Danish West Indian health policies were often quite unique and efficient, but also that the health of the enslaved was a contested field, showing an ongoing power struggle between the planters, the colonial administration, and the slaves themselves.