From the Pre-Colonial to the Virtual

The Scope and Scape of Land, Landuse, and Landloss on Montserrat

Bibliographic Data

ID20055793
AuthorsJ Skinner (0000-0001-5319-2606, corresponding author)
Year2007
Pages219-232
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueCaribbean Land and Development Revisited (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan US (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/9780230605046_17
OpenAlexW2467461266
ISBN9780230605046
LanguageEN
Citations received4
References cited16

This chapter is about the island Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean, in the Leeward Islands, an island that for the past 300 years has been British and evinces its colonial history in its landuse patterns—landscapes and taskscapes so I shall argue in this chapter. The majority of islanders are direct descendants of slaves imported to the island by the British from West Africa as labor commodities under a system of plantation exploitation that lasted from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-nineteenth century. Until 1995, those descendents numbered approximately 11,000, many tracing their names and forebears back to the plantation land estates that they had belonged to, worked and struggled and born and died on, and been buried under. Due to volcanic eruption, the present-day island population of 3,000–4,000 lives with a very different landscape and taskscape, and those who left the island or who had their lands in the south destroyed have been left to rely upon virtual notions of land.KeywordsVolcanic EruptionAnthropological TheoryChief MinisterFamily LandAlternative TourismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves

Archaeology · Colonialism · Ethnology · Genealogy · Geography · Land use · Population · Scope (computer science) · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Demography · Ecology · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

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