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[...] Unlike the racialized segregation in the slave states of the Deep South or in apartheid South Africa, racial difference in the Caribbean was not legally entrenched. Voting criteria were based not on race but on property. Race formed part of an informal system and a source of tacit social know…

I shifted from thinking of theory as the search for the certainty of all-embracing totalities (which is how a generation of us originally encountered Marxism), to the necessity of recognizing the power of contingency in all historical processes and explanations (which is how we went on to understan…

For a while the planters tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain the workforce supply with convicts and war captives. But they also quickly succumbed to the murderous labour regime and to disease. When in 1713 the British broke the Dutch monopoly of the African slave trade as a result of the Treaty of U…

To evoke my mental world in this way is to follow history from its ‘bad’ side, as Brecht has it, focusing on the afflictions which were lodged in our inner lives. This is the story of colonial oppression. But while true, it misses an important dimension. Intellectually there were also virtues in ou…

The emergence of this system of universal, mass politics coincided with my own growing up. I had inside me the sensibilities of the colonial order of things. But for my generation, following 1938, in no way could the colonial system represent our future. We could only perceive it as an unwanted imp…