This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Texts presented in the volumes cover the first impressions of the region, imperial rivalries between European traders and settlers and the experience of day-to-day life in the colonies. Volume 1: Conceptualizing the West Indies The texts in this volume chart the growth of English interest in the West Indies, as seen through the publications of the time. Beginning with the Spanish discovery and colonization there followed reports of Spanish cruelty. Gradually the English started to make incursions into the area and this new era of colonization is reflected in the sources. Later publications document the landscape of the islands, the native inhabitants and the other settlers who began to arrive.

This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Texts presented in the volumes cover the first impressions of the region, imperial rivalries between European traders and settlers and the experience of day-to-day life in the colonies. Volume 3: Living in the Caribbean Once settlements were firmly established articles began to appear promoting the way of life to those back at home. Numerous texts advertised the climate, the crops and the social life, and the recruitment of settlers generated a literature offering land, liberty and other benefits to those who migrated. Recruiting labour on the islands presented a particular problem. A transatlantic trade in servants was developed initially and some groups, including Quakers, and those convicted after the Monmouth Rebellion, were coerced into settling, but in the end the colonists came to rely on slavery. Sources document the growing involvement of English traders in the sale of enslaved Africans as well as the development of laws and the administration of justice on the islands.

This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Texts presented in the volumes cover the first impressions of the region, imperial rivalries between European traders and settlers and the experience of day-to-day life in the colonies. Volume 4: Making Meaning The flora and fauna of the islands and their economic potential was documented in a number of tracts which also helped to promote the colony as an attractive and bountiful place to settle. Running counter to the promotional literature was a whole sub-genre on natural disasters. Hurricanes and earthquakes were relatively common, and the commentators who wrote about them did so from a variety of motives: to entertain, to shock, to warn or simply to record them. Often portrayed as irreligious, settlers engaged energetically in the religious debates of the time. Dissenters were encouraged or coerced into leaving for the colonies and a number of Quaker publications condemned the transportation of their coreligionists. Though most settlers were members of the Church of England, its textual footprint was quite small and many more dissenting tracts have survived.

This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Texts presented in the volumes cover the first impressions of the region, imperial rivalries between European traders and settlers and the experience of day-to-day life in the colonies. Volume 2: Fitting into the Empire This volume documents the political situation in the Caribbean within the context of imperial rivalries. The Spanish tried to repulse all other newcomers, and by the 1660s territorial disputes between the English, the French and the Dutch were commonplace. Eventually, English, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish territories were established, ushering in a new era of small colonial outposts. Trading networks were built up, with sugar becoming the main export and the source of both wealth and controversy. Documents attest to the strong feelings provoked by the high duty on sugar as well as giving an insight into the day-to-day problems of managing plantations. New territories required new systems of governance. Issues surrounding these were reported and discussed in various publications aimed at an English readership. Printed compilations of colonial laws also gave readers back in England the chance to gain insights into the whole legal framework needed to meet the needs of Caribbean settlements.

"By the end of the seventeenth century, the English participated energetically in and thought deeply about the West Indies, a drastic change from their minimal involvement and imperfect knowledge of the 1560s. In the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish monopolized the Caribbean Sea, and prohibited all others access to it. Those Englishmen and women who sought to learn about it consulted a limited number of texts that had been produced in other languages; such knowledge was the purview of the elite. That situation changed on both fronts. Direct experience came as English people travelled to the West Indies and began to stake claims on lands there, while broader awareness increased as interested booksellers and writers translated foreign language texts or composed new accounts. These four volumes chart the changing engagement in the West Indies on the part of the English both as adventurers (to use the early modern term for those who 'ventured' their lives or fortunes) and as translators, writers and publishers. The centrality of the region to the growing English commitment to the wider world can be followed in the proliferation of a variety of texts that earned publication over the thirteen decades from the 1570s and the 1690s"--Introduction.

This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Texts presented in the volumes cover the first impressions of the region, imperial rivalries between European traders and settlers and the experience of day-to-day life in the colonies.

The West Indies has captured the English imagination since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Though initially claimed by Spain, the English, French and Dutch were also keen to exploit the islands and their wealth. The Caribbean held both enormous potential and serious danger. Pirates, drawn by the possibility of riches, operated in the region, disease and disaster were rife and the Spanish were prepared to defend their colonies by force. In spite of such obstacles England established plantations on a number of Caribbean islands in the 1620s, before Oliver Cromwell began an ambitious military campaign to take the islands in 1655. England's Caribbean colonies became the most profitable of her New World empire. Merchants and settlers arrived and bought land, they set up plantations, they traded in sugar and slaves. This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Through these writings the Caribbean became known and discussed in the drawing rooms and coffee-houses of England.0Organized thematically, texts cover first impressions of the region, rivalries between European traders and settlers, labour, governance, religion, natural history and the experience of everyday life in the colonies. It will be of interest to those researching the early Caribbean, empire and colonization, Atlantic studies, maritime history, piracy and the history of slavery.

This book provides a legal historical insight into colonial laws on enslavement and the plantation system in the British West Indies. The volume is a work of comparative legal history of the English-speaking Caribbean which concentrates on how the laws of England served to catalyse the slavery laws and also legislation pertaining to post-emancipation societies. The book illustrates how these “borrowed” laws from England not only developed colonial slavery laws within the English-speaking Caribbean but also inspired the slavery codes of a number of North American plantation systems. The cusp of the work focuses on the interconnectivities among the English-speaking slave holding Atlantic and how persons, free and unfree, moved throughout the system and brought laws with them which greatly affected the various enslaved societies. The book will be essential reading for students and researchers interested in colonial slavery, Caribbean studies and Black and Atlantic history.

How vagrancy, as legal and imaginative category, shaped the role of policing in colonialism, racial formation, and resource distribution In this innovative book demonstrating the important role of eighteenth-century literary treatments of policing and vagrancy, Nicolazzo offers a prehistory of police legitimacy in a period that predates the establishment of the modern police force. She argues that narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices shaped not only police and legal activity of the period, but also public conceptions of police power. Her extensive research delves into law and literature on both sides of the Atlantic, tracking the centrality of vagrancy in establishing police power as a form of sovereignty crucial to settler colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. The first book in several generations to address policing and vagrancy in the eighteenth century, and the first in the field to center race and empire in its account of literary vagrancy, Nicolazzo's work is a significant contribution to the field of eighteenth-century literary and cultural studies.