The global expansion of European colonization is commonly perceived as lawful according to the valid European colonial law of the time. This book is substantially challenging this belief by uncovering its legal justifications based on discovery and terra nullius as retrospectively created legal fictions and demonstrating it ́s untenability in practice. Focused on the critical reconstruction of Spanish and Dutch colonization practices in northeastern South America, Trinidad and Tobago between 1498 and 1817, the book offers an illuminating view on the European shadow of the colonial past in the Americas. Based on the application of an innovative comparative spatio-legal Global History approach to 1,770 excavated European colonial written sources from archives of both sides of the Atlantic in comparison to the colonial legal provisions of Europe ́s most influential legal writers, the book, moreover, provides a substantial argument to the contemporary Caribbean-European reparation debate in favor of the return of Indigenous Peoples ́ historical territories. Therefore, the book calls for the extension of the traditional territory approach to reparations of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIPs) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR).

Pre-Columbian and historic Amerindian archaeology -- Primary historic sources and maps -- Various historical and anthropological accounts -- Amerindian cultural heritage -- Appendix. Institutions and museums with significant archaeological holdings from Trinidad and Tobago -- Index -- _GoBack -- _GoBack -- Blank Page -- Blank Page

Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution--and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it--occur in eighteenth-century England, and not at some other time, or in some other place? Why didn't industrialization make the whole world rich--and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer? In A Farewell to Alms, Gregory Clark tackles these profound questions and suggests a new and provocative way in which culture--not exploitation, geography, or resources--explains the wealth, and the poverty, of nations. Countering the prevailing theory that the Industrial Revolution was sparked by the sudden development of stable political, legal, and economic institutions in seventeenth-century Europe, Clark shows that such institutions existed long before industrialization. He argues instead that these institutions gradually led to deep cultural changes by encouraging people to abandon hunter-gatherer instincts-violence, impatience, and economy of effort-and adopt economic habits-hard work, rationality, and education. The problem, Clark says, is that only societies that have long histories of settlement and security seem to develop the cultural characteristics and effective workforces that enable economic growth. For the many societies that have not enjoyed long periods of stability, industrialization has not been a blessing. Clark also dissects the notion, championed by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, that natural endowments such as geography account for differences in the wealth of nations. A brilliant and sobering challenge to the idea that poor societies can be economically developed through outside intervention, A Farewell to Alms may change the way global economic history is understood.

The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

By approaching the colonial Caribbean as an interconnected region, Tessa Murphy recasts small islands as the site of broader contests over Indigenous dominion, racial belonging, economic development, and colonial subjecthood.

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam chronicles the experiences, identity and achievements of enslaved black people in Morocco from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. Chouki El Hamel argues that we cannot rely solely on Islamic ideology as the key to explain social relations and particularly the history of black slavery in the Muslim world, for this viewpoint yields an inaccurate historical record of the people, institutions and social practices of slavery in Northwest Africa. El Hamel focuses on black Moroccans' collective experience beginning with their enslavement to serve as the loyal army of the Sultan Isma'il. By the time the Sultan died in 1727, they had become a political force, making and unmaking rulers well into the nineteenth century. The emphasis on the political history of the black army is augmented by a close examination of the continuity of black Moroccan identity through the musical and cultural practices of the Gnawa.