From the 16th century onwards, the Republic of the United Provinces, or the Dutch Republic, developed into a state with extensive maritime economic activities (fisheries, trade and whaling) with an extensive trade network in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and North and South America. In the wake of these developments, the navy of the republic found itself involved in many conflicts throughout the early modern era. Sometimes this was for conquest, but most of the time these involvements were to defend. In other words, the maritime power of the republic was mostly used for defensive, rather than offensive, operations. In this chapter we will explore two cases where the republic used naval powers: the Eighty Years War (1568–1648), a struggle between a few rebellious states in the Netherlands and the Spanish Habsburg Empire, and three wars between England and the republic that happened in the second half of the seventeenth century. We will discuss the sources, the presence of a maritime revolution, and the question of who was in charge in deciding the objective for the creation of grand strategy, who were the opponents, what were the causes of the wars, what where the objectives, what means were at the disposal of the republic to achieve its objectives, how priorities were decided and to what degree did cultural and emotional factors play a role in prioritisation.

Catherine Peters discusses how writers such as the Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano reworked the Romantic trope of the revolutionary “common wind” to forge kinship networks among forcibly displaced peoples. In formulating this argument, Peters shifts the conventional focus on the French Revolution as the hub of radical Romantic thought to the Haitian Revolution, where “fraternité” refers not to an abstract ideal but a very real desire to reconstitute those family relations disrupted by the institution of slavery.

In this chapter, I acknowledge the intertwined histories of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies across the Black diaspora. In doing so, I draw from the notion of ‘transcendent literacy’ to attend to the long legacy of languaging emerging out of the Black race and reaching across the Black diaspora while also lamenting the invented illiteracy often imposed in characterizations of Black peoples worldwide. Acknowledging the traditional lineage of ‘Diaspora Literacy’ in making visible interconnections across Black peoples within and beyond the US, I then present Caribbean Englishes across the Black diaspora, describing the languaging, Englishes, and literacies of English-speaking Afro-Caribbean students in the Caribbean and in the US. Based on this discussion, I call for a silencing of the historical tradition of invented illiteracy used to characterize Black peoples across the diaspora and invite a strengthening of accessible knowledges surrounding the rich literate and linguistic heritages they inherently possess. Through this discussion, it is possible to understand the broader transnational contexts influencing racialized translanguaging and transsemiotizing in Black immigrant literacies and thus, the inherently induced economic bases for racialization of language.

In this chapter, I begin by complicating how Black immigrants’ perception as a ‘model minority’ in the US creates a challenge for equitably engaging with their literacies and languaging as a function of schooling. Joining the conversation on immigrant and transnational literacies, I present foundational language and literacy research in the US that has functioned as a backdrop against which Black Caribbean immigrants’ literacies and languaging are considered. To situate Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies within its broader contexts, I then discuss education, migration, and cultures across the Black diaspora addressing the historical and contemporary educational landscape of Black people in the Caribbean. I further accomplish this situational placement of Afro-Caribbean languaging, Englishes, and literacies through a discussion of the historical and contemporary socio-educational landscape of Black immigrants in the US. Through this broadly painted portrait operating at the interstices of the educational, racial, historical, social, linguistic, and religious domains in the lives of Black Caribbean peoples and specifically youth, this chapter serves as a nuanced and contextual backdrop against which to understand the analyses of Black Caribbean immigrant youth’s language and literacies presented in this book.

As Stephen Dedalus walks upon Sandymount Strand in Ulysses, he thinks, “the land a maze of dark cunning nets … Ringsend: wigwams of brown steersman and master mariners. Human shells” (3.154–57). This thought evokes Ireland’s complicated position as an island nation and its entanglements with fellow colonized peoples. For Ireland’s cultural mariners of the twentieth century, navigating such currents requires a knowledge not only of sea but also of sky. In the “Wandering Rocks” episode of Ulysses, a chapter where the city of Dublin is the prominent star, the sections are separated by a series of three asterisks also known as a dinkus. As a writer for the Paris Review explains, a dinkus is “used as a section break in a text. It’s the flatlining of an asterism (⁂), which in literature is a pyramid of three asterisks and in astronomy is a cluster of stars.” Asterisms serve as a striking intervention into the textual groundswells of Joyce’s Ulysses that ultimately connect to Derek Walcott’s own navigations in Omeros as a means of paternal inheritance and transatlantic affiliation.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the origins of the West India Regiments in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean. It then introduces key concepts that will be used throughout the book, especially that of ’military spectacle’ (from Scott Myerly) as well as ’martial hybridity’, which is a take on Homi Bhabha’s formulation. The chapter goes on to argue that the Black soldiers of the regiments are an important but hitherto ignored feature in what Catherine Hall termed the ’war of representation’ that was fought over slavery and the image of people of African descent. It ends by outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

This chapter considers a key change in the military spectacle of the West India Regiments in the mid-to-late 1850s when the uniform for all ranks below commissioned officer was altered to one inspired by France’s Zouave forces. Representing a form of martial rebranding, this was a dramatic shift that ended the policy of using the same basic uniforms as other British Foot Regiments. Two interpretive frames for this ‘Zouavisation’ of the West India Regiments are offered. First, there was a desire to emulate and replicate the picturesque valour that the French Zouaves had displayed in the Crimean War, a sentiment strongly expressed by Queen Victoria herself. Second, there was an effort to assign uniforms that were more sensitive to the local conditions in which British military units operated. In the case of the West India Regiments, this policy served to inscribe racial differences between troops, as demonstrated by the fact that the officers of the regiments were not required to wear Zouave-style uniforms. This change reflected shifting ideas about people of African descent, as well as about tropicality, in this period.

Even after the soldiers of the West India Regiments helped to suppress enslaved uprisings in Barbados (1816) and Demerara (1823), they continued to be objects of suspicion. This chapter examines the efforts that commanding officers and supporters of the regiments made to challenge such opposition by seeking to manage the image of their Black soldiers and portray them in a favourable light. What emerged was the ‘steady Black soldier’, an ambiguous racial-martial figure that was simultaneously soldierly yet passive. This theme is explored through both the predominant representation of the soldiers as standing ‘ready for inspection’ and the elision of any active military role. This image is placed in the context of wider debates about the figure of the Black subject that characterised the contemporaneous controversy over slavery and it will be argued that the steady Black soldier represents the military equivalent to the kneeling enslaved figure promulgated by anti-slavery advocates.

The secondary status of the electric guitar in Anglo-Caribbean popular music is explored with an emphasis on recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, and reggae as the region’s most widely globalized music. Early guitarists in Jamaican popular music, Ernest Ranglin and Lynn Taitt, are referenced, alongside analyses of the instrument in the reggae recordings of The Wailers, and the works of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh featuring other players such as Donald Kinsey in lead guitar roles. The chapter utilizes first-hand interviews with key figures and also focuses on Eddy Grant as one of the most visible Caribbean guitarists through his international pop star career spanning several decades. The twenty-first-century emergence of the Trinidad-based metal act Orange Sky, fusing rock and reggae influences, is also discussed.