The new Antilles book of the week, dear readers, is The Changing Society of Tobago, 1838-1938, by Susan Craig-James–a massive social, economic, political, and cultural history of Tobago, published in two oversize volumes, for a total of more than seven hundred pages. It draws on over two decades of research, and offers an astonishing richness of primary materials, historical documents, statistics, rare oral-history accounts from nearly a hundred elderly Tobagonians, and a profusion of images. Craig-James uses this mass of carefully sifted information not just “to describe the social structure of Tobago over time”, in the words of the jacket copy, but also to analyse major changes in the island’s agrarian economy after the end of slavery and explain the collapse of agriculture in Tobago in the early twentieth century. It is a monumental text.
The Changing Society of Tobago is available at bookshops in Trinidad and Tobago and at New Beacon Books in London, but at the moment does not appear to be available for sale online. You can contact the publisher, Cornerstone Press, at corpress AT tstt DOT net DOT tt for more information.
