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 territories. Given that education is a key vehicle for promoting British colonial identity and cohesion in these diverse lands far from the ‘mother country’, this paper 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 was commonplace in the late colonial and early independence periods. Accordingly, utilising a postcolonial perspective and applying a case study approach, this preliminary contribution aims 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.