Antigua and Barbuda an Annotated Critical Bibliography
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Antigua and Barbuda an annotated critical bibliography by Riva Berleant-Schiller and Susan Lowes, with Milton Benjamin Volume 182 of the World Bibliographical Series 1995 Clio Press ABC Clio, Ltd. (Oxford, England; Santa Barbara, California; Denver, Colorado) Abstract: Antigua and Barbuda, two islands of Leeward Island group in the eastern Caribbean, together make up a single independent state. The union is an uneasy one, for their relationship has always been ambiguous and their differences in history and economy greater than their similarities. Barbuda was forced unwillingly into the union and it is fair to say that Barbudan fears of subordination and exploitation under an Antiguan central government have been realized. Barbuda is a flat, dry limestone island. Its economy was never dominated by plantation agriculture. Instead, its inhabitants raised food and livestock for their own use and for provisioning the Antigua plantations of the island's lessees, the Codrington family. After the end of slavery, Barbudans resisted attempts to introduce commercial agriculture and stock-rearing on the island. They maintained a subsistence and small cash economy based on shifting cultivation, fishing, livestock, and charcoal-making, and carried it out under a commons system that gave equal rights to land to all Barbudans. Antigua, by contrast, was dominated by a sugar plantation economy that persisted after slave emancipation into the twentieth century. Its economy and goals are now shaped by the kind of high-impact tourism development that includes gambling casinos and luxury hotels. The Antiguan government values Barbuda primarily for its sparsely populated lands and comparatively empty beaches. This bibliography is the only comprehensive reference book available for locating information about Antigua and Barbuda. It gathers a variety of sources on a full range of topics, most of them in English, and provides informative and evaluative annotations for each one. Students, researchers, librarians, travellers, and business people will find this bibliography invaluable, as will Barbudans and Antiguans themselves. Please note that the bibliography stops at 1995. 1 ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA BIBLIOGRAPHY TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION xiiix to xxviii 1. THE COUNTRY AND ITS PEOPLE: entries 1-6 Antigua Barbuda 2. TRAVEL GUIDES AND TRAVELLERS’ ACCOUNTS: entries 7-39 Contemporary Guides and Accounts Historical Guides and Accounts 3. GEOGRAPHY: entries 57-78 General Barbuda Maps Antigua Barbuda 4. GEOLOGY AND NATURAL HAZARDS: entries 79-112 General Antigua Barbuda Natural Hazards General Antigua 5. FLORA AND FAUNA: entries 113-202 Flora: 113-130 General Antigua Barbuda Fauna: 131-202 Land and Sea Invertebrates Reptiles, Amphibians, Fish Mammals and Birds 6. PREHISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY: entries 203-233 General Antigua Barbuda 2 7. HISTORY: entries 234-309 General Early Colonial Period to 1710 General Antigua Barbuda Slavery and Emancipation (1711-1834) General Antigua Barbuda Post-Emancipation (1835-1980) General Antigua Barbuda 8. POPULATION: entries 310-314 General Antigua 9. LANGUAGE: entries 315-324 General Antigua Barbuda 10. RELIGION: entries 325-334 General Antigua 11. SOCIAL ORGANIZATION: entries 335-351 General Antigua Barbuda Gender General Antigua Barbuda Class and Colour Antigua 12. HEALTH AND WELFARE: entries 352-366 General Antigua Barbuda 3 13. POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT: entries 367-401 General Antigua 14. LAW AND CONSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT: entries 402-426 Law Constitutional development Problems of Independence and Joint Statehood: Barbuda: 418-426 15. ECONOMY AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: entries 427-459 General Antigua Tourism 16. AGRICULTURE, FISHING, AND FORESTRY: entries 460-514 Commodities: Sugar and Cotton General Antigua Farming General Antigua Barbuda Livestock, Fishing, and Forestry General Antigua Barbuda Land Tenure, Land Use, and Soils General Antigua Barbuda 17. LABOUR AND THE LABOUR MOVEMENT: entries 515-521 General Antigua 18. ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION: entries 522-530 General Antigua Barbuda 19. EDUCATION: entries 531-541 Antigua 20. LITERATURE AND FOLKLORE: entries 542-565 Antigua 4 Barbuda 21. CULTURE, THE ARTS, AND ARCHITECTURE: entries 566-576 General Culture and the Arts Architecture 22. SPORT: entries 577-582 General Antigua 23. NEWSPAPERS AND PERIODICALS: entries 583-619 General Newspapers General Antigua Barbuda Periodicals General Antigua 24. REFERENCE SOURCES: entries 620-633 General Databases INDICES: Index references are to the entry numbers, not page numbers. INDEX OF AUTHORS INDEX OF TITLES INDEX OF SUBJECTS MAPS MAP OF ANTIGUA MAP OF BARBUDA Introduction 5 Two Islands and a Region Island groups share common features, yet all islands are unique. Proximity, regional economies, and similar relationships to the outside world conjoin them; small scale disparities in history, biotic communities, and internal ecological relationships distinguish them. Barbuda and Antigua are good examples of the blend of similarity and difference that prevails throughout the Caribbean region and that makes its islands and island groups intriguing to study and to visit. They are bound together politically in one independent state, and geologically as the surface features of a common underwater formation, but their joint statehood is as full of disparate aims and interests as their topographies are distinct. Their histories have long been linked, but their productive and land use systems, class and demographic structures, and ecological relationships have always diverged. Not only Antigua and Barbuda, but all the islands and littorals of the Caribbean illustrate the complexities of regional commonality and difference and the problems of defining regions and boundaries. Geographically, Antigua and Barbuda are part of the Antilles, and more specifically the Lesser Antilles. Historically they are parts of the former British Leeward Islands Colony, which at various times also included St. Christopher, Nevis, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, and Dominica, and today are part of the British Commonwealth Caribbean. From a linguistic point of view they belong to the Anglophone Caribbean, which emphasizes the fact that English is taught and spoken, but neglects the fact that mother tongues are Creoles, often but not exclusively 6 English Creoles. From the broadest perspectives they are, in climate and vegetation, parts of the American tropics; historically and economically they are a part of Plantation America--that region of the Americas from Brazil to the Chesapeake deeply influenced by slavery and plantation production; and politically part of the Caribbean Basin, where colonial status has only recently been mitigated by independence and new mini-states. Slavery, plantations, and colonialism—explanatory generalizations most often applied to the Caribbean region—apply equally to other areas of the American tropics and subtropics. We need think only of the U. S. South, for example, or northeastern Brazil. But some features set the Caribbean islands apart from other regions of Plantation America: these include the recency of political independence, except for Haiti; the near- destruction of native peoples in the early period of European entry; the mosaic of languages and metropolitan connections in so small a land area; the commercial and strategic centrality of the islands during the eighteenth century; and the very fact of islandness, which is not the same as insularity. If all of this is well known it is not necessarily fully understood. The islands themselves are not accounted for, either singly or as a group. Discussions of the unity and diversity within the region are far from conclusive and seem inexhaustible. The two islands, Barbuda and Antigua, embody the ambiguities of unity and diversity that prevail throughout the Caribbean region. Linked ("united" would not describe the relationship in any but a 7 legal sense) since 1981 in an unequal partnership that privileges Antigua, their joint statehood further confuses an ambiguous relationship that has prevailed since the seventeenth century, when their economic courses diverged. Within this relationship, always imposed upon them, and within the regional Afro-Caribbean culture they share, their individuality is unambiguous. Geology and Environment As a group, the Lesser Antilles were formed in an unstable region of the earth's crust by seismic and volcanic processes on the one hand, and by coral reefbuilding on the other. They are the crests of an old system of submarine volcanic ridges forming one younger, higher, moister group of islands that are still volcanically active (Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, Martinique, and on south), and a second older, outer arc of limestone islands (principally Anguilla, St. Maarten, St. Barts, Antigua, Barbuda, and Barbados). During Pleistocene and Holocene or recent times, volcanic activity has diminished and of uplift, tilting, reef-building, and erosion have modified the Antillean islands. All of these processes influenced Antigua, but Barbuda, like Barbados and St. Maarten, was shaped mainly by coral reef-building. Volcanism and orogenesis had no part in the shaping the surface of these islands, and they are flat and dry. Earthquakes as well as volcanoes affect the Lesser Antilles, both the consequences of tectonic plate movement in the region. Antigua and Barbuda are the surface features of a single submarine platform, the Barbuda Bank, which is separated from neighboring islands by depths of over a thousand 8 feet. Antigua