Islands Forests And Gardens In The Caribbean

"The continuing struggle to preserve the ecological abundance of the eastern Caribbean is a recurrent theme in this collection of essays on the gardens (both botanical and small holdings) and the forests of such diverse islands as Martinique, St. Vincent, St. Domingue (present Haiti), and Barbados. It pays homage to the indigenous Caribbean people and imported slaves and their descendants, who fashioned gardens in remote jungles to achieve both personal dignity and independence from the slave and post-slave plantation economy. The book's pioneers include botanists and gardeners from many countries, who strove to introduce food crops and medicines to the Caribbean for an ever-growing population, and enlightened local administrators, who tried to prevent the rashes of deforestation and its consequent climate changes wherever they could. This includes, in contemporary times, Dr. Earle Kirby of Kingstown, who has studied and acted on these questions all his life, and in whose honour this book is created. The contributors' essays allow readers to understand the interplay of very local conditions and individual initiatives with larger global dynamics and structures, in order for all interested parties to build the environmental institutions needed to protect this region from growing multi-national exploitation."--BOOK JACKET.

Sustainable horticulture is gaining increasing attention in the field of agriculture as demand for the food production rises to the world community. Sustainable horticultural systems are based on ecological principles to farm, optimizes pest and disease management approaches through environmentally friendly and renewable strategies in production agriculture. It is a discipline that addresses current issues such as food security, water pollution, soil health, pest control, and biodiversity depletion. Novel, environmentally-friendly solutions are proposed based on integrated knowledge from sciences as diverse as agronomy, soil science, entomology, ecology, chemistry and food sciences. Sustainable horticulture interprets methods and processes in the farming system to the global level. For that, horticulturists use the system approach that involves studying components and interactions of a whole system to address scientific, economic and social issues. In that respect, sustainable horticulture is not a classical, narrow science. Instead of solving problems using the classical painkiller approach that treats only negative impacts, sustainable horticulture treats problem sources.

This book is invaluable to the casual visitor or tourist to the Caribbean in helping to identify the more common and interesting trees likely to be encountered during a short stay in the islands. Each species is illustrated with at least one colour photograph and detailed information is given about leaf shape, leaf size and colour, together with descriptions of the specific flowers and fruits. Should the reader wish to study particular species in more detail, the botanical family name is supplied together with the relevant scientific name.

This ebook is a selective guide designed to help scholars and students of the ancient world find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs. Written by a leading international authority on the subject, the ebook provides bibliographic information supported by direct recommendations about which sources to consult and editorial commentary to make it clear how the cited sources are interrelated. This ebook is just one of many articles from Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History, a continuously updated and growing online resource designed to provide authoritative guidance through the scholarship and other materials relevant to the study of Atlantic History, the study of the transnational interconnections between Europe, North America, South America, and Africa, particularly in the early modern and colonial period. Oxford Bibliographies Online covers most subject disciplines within the social science and humanities, for more information visit www.oxfordbibliographies.com.

Contributors from the US, Britain and Europe explore a neglected aspect of transatlantic slavery: the implication of a continental European hinterland.

For some time before his death in July 2015, former colleagues and students of Paul Langford had discussed the possibility of organising a festschrift to celebrate his remarkable contribution to eighteenth-century history. It was planned for 2019 to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of his seminal A Polite and Commercial People, the opening volume in the New Oxford History of England series, Paul's best-known and most influential publication. He was delighted to hear of these plans and the tragic news of his death only made the contributors more determined to see the project through to completion. The importance of A Polite and Commercial People within its own time is unquestionable. Not only did it provide a powerful new vision of eighteenth-century Britain, but it also played a vital part in reviving interest in, and expanding ways of thinking about, Georgian history. As the thirteen contributors to this volume amply testify, any review of the field from the 1980s onwards cannot ignore the profound effect Paul's research had on the social and political publications in his field. This collection of essays combines reflection on the impact of Paul's work with further engagement with the central questions he posed. In particular, it serves to re-connect various recent avenues of Georgian studies, bringing together diverse themes present in Paul's scholarship, but which are often studied independently of each other. As such, it aims to provide a fitting tribute to Paul's work and impact, and a wider reassessment of the current direction of eighteenth-century studies.

Roots of Power tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea, St. Vincent, and Tanzania, dracaena and cordyline plants are simultaneously property rights institutions, markers of social organization, and expressions of life-force and vitality. In addition to their localized roles in forming landscapes and societies, these plants mark multiple boundaries and demonstrate deep historical connections across much of the planet’s tropics. These plants’ deep roots in society and culture have made them the routes through which postcolonial agrarian societies have negotiated both social and cultural continuity and change. This book is a multi-sited ethnographic political ecology of ethnobotanical institutions. It uses five parallel case studies to investigate the central phenomenon of "boundary plants" and establish the linkages among the case studies via both ancient and relatively recent demographic transformations such as the Bantu expansion across tropical Africa, the Austronesian expansion into the Pacific, and the colonial system of plantation slavery in the Black Atlantic. Each case study is a social-ecological system with distinctive characteristics stemming from the ways that power is organized by kinship and gender, social ranking, or racialized capitalism. This book contributes to the literature on property rights institutions and land management by arguing that tropical boundary plants’ social entanglements and cultural legitimacy make them effective foundations for development policy. Formal recognition of these institutions could reduce contradiction, conflict, and ambiguity between resource managers and states in postcolonial societies and contribute to sustainable livelihoods and landscapes. This book will appeal to scholars and students of environmental anthropology, political ecology, ethnobotany, landscape studies, colonial history, and development studies, and readers will benefit from its demonstration of the comparative method.

This study represents a contribution to the pre-Colonial archaeology of the Windward Islands in the Caribbean. The research aimed to determine how the Ceramic Age (c. 400 BC - AD 1492) Amerindian inhabitants of the region related to one another and others at various geographic scales, with a view to better understanding social interaction and organisation within the Windward Islands as well the integration of this region within the macro-region. This research approached the study of intra- and inter-island interaction and social development through an island-by-island study of some 640 archaeological sites and their ceramic assemblages. Besides providing insight into settlement sequences, patterns and micro-mobility through time, it also highlighted various configurations of sites spread across different islands that were united by shared ceramic (decorative) traits. These configurations were more closely examined by taking recourse to graph-theory. By extending the comparative scope of this research to the Greater Antilles and the South American mainland, possible material cultural influences from more distant regions could be suggested. While Windward Island communities certainly developed a localised material cultural identity, they remained open to a host of wide-ranging influences outside the Windward Island micro-region. As such, rather than representing a cultural backwater operating in the periphery of a burgeoning Taíno empire, it is argued that Windward Island communities actively and flexibly realigned themselves with several mainland South American societies in Late Ceramic Age times (c. AD 700-1500), forging and maintaining significant ties and exchange relationships. Alistair Bright was a member of the Caribbean Research Group at Leiden University from 2003 to 2010 and participated in numerous archaeological surveys and excavations in the Caribbean during that time. His research interests include the archaeology, ethnohistory and ethnography of the Caribbean and South America, as well as the archaeology of island societies throughout the world in general.