Product details
- ISBN 9780252073274
- Weight: 367g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 25 Apr 2006
- Publisher: University of Illinois Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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A reporter's firsthand portrait of formerly enslaved Jamaicans in the years after emancipation
John Bigelow’s Jamaica in 1850 provided an important document in the antislavery movement in the United States and Great Britain. Jamaica’s economy had collapsed after the 1838 emancipation. American supporters of enslavement used the Jamaican example to argue that abolition at home would unleash economic and social chaos. Bigelow’s vivid eyewitness reporting undermined that widely held view by proving Jamaica’s problems originated in the incompetence of absentee white planters and an obsolete colonial system. As Bigelow showed, many once-enslaved Jamaicans had in fact become successful small-scale landowners in the twelve years after emancipation while the large plantations languished.
John Bigelow (1817-1911) was an editor at the New York Evening Post and an organizer of the Free-Soil party. Robert J. Scholnick is a professor of English and American studies at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of books including Edmund Clarence Stedman.
