A Guide To Sources For The History Of The Danish West Indies U S Virgin Islands 1671 1917

The Danish West Indies - the islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix - were a traditional Caribbean colony, characterized by sugar production, trade, and shipping. The colony was under the Danish flag from 1671 until 1917, since which time the islands have been known as the United States Virgin Islands. The archival sources for the history of the three islands are first and foremost in the Danish National Archives. These records are exceptionally comprehensive and their research potential is enormously rich, as the Danes have been meticulous in documenting almost everything that happened in the colony and in preserving the records. The Danish archival sources are therefore unique historical resources today. This book is a thorough guide to the vast Danish West Indian material in Denmark.

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.

This book examines the relationships between archives, communities and collective memory through both the lens of a postcolonial society, the United States Virgin Islands, a former colony of Denmark, now a United States territory, and through an archival perspective on the relationship between communities and the creation of records. Because the historical records of the Virgin Islands reside primarily in Denmark and the United States, Virgin Islanders have had limited access to the primary sources of their history and this has affected both their ability to write their own history and to construct their collective memory. But while a strong oral tradition, often in competition with the written tradition, influences the ways in which this community remembers, it also underlines the dilemma of interpreting the history of the colonized through the records of the colonizer. The story of the Virgin Islands and its search for its memory includes an exploration of how this community, through public commemorations and folk tradition has formed its memory to date, and the role that archives play in this process. Interwoven throughout is a broader analysis of the place of archives and archivists in helping communities find their history. The book is exceptionally well written and will appeal to historians, archivists and those interested in the Carribean.

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.

Examines the economic history of the Caribbean, and is the first analysis to span the whole region.

In The Danish Slave Trade and Its Abolition, Erik Gøbel offers an account of the well-documented Danish transatlantic slave trade and discusses, in detail, the 1792 decision to abolish it.