Overview

Freedom's Children is the first comprehensive history of Jamaica's watershed 1938 labour rebellion and its aftermath. Colin Palmer argues that, a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, Jamaica's disgruntled workers challenged the oppressive status quo and forced a morally ossified British colonial society to recognise their grievances. The rebellion produced two rival leaders who dominated the political life of the colony through the achievement of independence in 1962. Alexander Bustamante, a moneylender, founded the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union and its progeny, the Jamaica Labour Party. Norman Manley, an eminent barrister, led the struggle for self-government and with others established the People's National Party. Palmer describes the ugly underside of British colonialism and details the persecution of Jamaican nationalists. He sheds new light on the nature of Bustamante's collaboration with the imperial regime, the rise of the trade-union movement, the struggle for constitutional change, and the emergence of party politics in a modernising Jamaica.

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9781469611693

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Reviews

Freedom's Children provides a detailed narrative and analysis of Jamaican political history between 1938 and 1944, centering on the roles, actions, ideas, and rivalry of Bustamante and Manley. Palmer's scholarship is impeccable. The book makes an important contribution to the historiography of modern Jamaica and, by extension, the Anglophone Caribbean. --Bridget Brereton, University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad & Tobago

A readable and free-flowing narrative. . . . Will be of interest to students of Jamaica's labor and political history.--The Historian

Author Information

Colin A. Palmer is a leading historian of the Caribbean and the African diaspora. Freedom's Children joins Palmer's Eric Williams and the Making of the Modern Caribbean and Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power in chronicling the history of British and U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean.

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