Colonial Identity in School Textbooks in the British West Indies:

Some Preliminary Remarks on Edward W. Daniel’s West Indian Histories

Abstract

Dispersed across the vast Caribbean Sea, for much of the twentieth century, the wider British
West Indies consisted of eight colonies: the islands of The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad
and Tobago, the Windward Islands, and the Leeward Islands, as well as the mainland
possessions of British Guiana and British Honduras. With markedly different ethnic,
sociocultural, and religious compositions, each colony was shaped by a panoply of economic,
social, and geographical factors, including the lasting imprint of the slave trade and – at
different points in history – the desire of various European powers to dominate and control the
different territories. With education representing a key vehicle of promoting British colonial
identity and cohesion in these diverse lands located far away from the ‘mother country’, this
presentation aims to explore how this identity is depicted in a well–known series of colonial–era
school textbooks. First published in 1936 and designed for pupils in the British West Indies,
Edward W. Daniels’s three–volume series of West Indian Histories were commonplace in the
late colonial and the early independence period. Accordingly, utilising a postcolonial perspective
and applying a case study approach, the aim of this preliminary contribution is to examine how
dominant narratives were presented through the analysis of two selected historical events (the
Atlantic slave trade and the Second Maroon War), thus illustrating how history was portrayed
and contextualised in the pages of these volumes.