Caribbean Land and Development Revisited »

Jean Besson (M.A., Ph.D. Edinburgh), a Jamaican, is Reader in Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, England. She has carried out research in Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean on cultural history, peasantries, land tenure, development, kinship, gender, and religion. Her publications include Land and Development in the Caribbean (co-edited with Janet Momsen, Macmillan, 1987); Martha Brae's Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (2002); and Caribbean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity (co-edited with Karen Fog Olwig, Macmillan, 2005).
Janet Momsen is Professor of Geography in the Department of Human and Community Development at the University of California, Davis. She has a B.A. and B.Litt. from Oxford, a M.Sc. from McGill, and a Ph.D. from London. Her research interests include gender and development, rural development and tourism in the Caribbean, Mexico, Eastern Europe and Bangladesh. Professor Momsen's publications on the Caribbean include Land and Development in the Caribbean (co-edited with Jean Besson, Macmillan, 1987); Women and Change in the Caribbean (1993); and Environmental Planning in the Caribbean (with Jonathan Pugh, 2006).

This collection of eighteen chapters plus an editorial introduction brings together studies of land and development throughout the Caribbean region by historians, anthropologists, geographers, land use planners, a sociologist and a human rights lawyer. Themes include post-emancipation access to land for the former slaves, soil erosion, crop production, agro-biodiversity, tourism, fishing, migration, land tenure, landscape and environment, and various aspects of land policy, planning and management. The chapters cover a range of territories in the Hispanic, Francophone, English-speaking and Dutch Caribbean. This volume is a sequel to the editors' earlier ground-breaking book Land and Development in the Caribbean (Macmillan, 1987) and, with a new cast of authors and an entirely new collection of essays, provides fresh perspectives on Caribbean land and development based on both historical and contemporary research.

Introduction--Jean Besson & Janet Momsen
• PART I: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LAND AND CROP PRODUCTION * The Importance of the 1897 British Royal Commission--Bonham C. Richardson
• The Colonial Office and Soil Conservation in the British Caribbean, 1938-1950--Lawrence S. Grossman * Domestic Food Production in Guadeloupe in World War II--Glenroy Taitt * Cuba's Farmers' Markets in the "Special Period", 1990-1995--Torres, Momsen & Niemeier
• PART II: POLICY, PLANNING, AND MANAGEMENT * Land, Development, and Indigenous Rights in Suriname: The Role of International Human Rights Law--Ellen-Rose Kambel * The Management of State Lands in Trinidad and Tobago--J. David Stanfield & A.A. Wijetunga
• The Participation Paradox: Stories from St. Lucia--Jonathan Pugh
• Land Disputes and Development Activity in the Dominican Republic--Donald Mcleod
• Land Policy in Jamaica in the Decade after AGENDA 21--Learie A. Miller & David Barker
• PART III: LAND FOR THE PEASANTRY?
• "Squatting" as a Strategy for Land Settlement and Sustainable Development--Jean Besson
• The Triumph of the Commons: Barbuda Belongs to All Barbudans Together--David Lowenthal & Colin Clarke
• The Contested Existence of a Peasantry in Martinique: Scientific Discourses, Controversies and Evidence--Christine Chivallon
• The Waxing and Waning of Land for the Peasantry in Barbados--Janet Momsen
• Agro-biodiversity as an Environmental Management Tool in Small Scale Farming Landscapes: Implications for Agro-Chemical Use--Balfour Spence & Elizabeth Thomas-Hope
• PART IV: LANDSCAPE, MIGRATION, AND DEVELOPMENT
• Arboreal Landscapes of Power and Resistance--Mimi Sheller
• From the Pre-Colonial to the Virtual: The Scope and Scape of Land, Landuse and Landloss on Montserrat--Jonathan Skinner
• "Leave to Come Back": The Importance of Family Land in a Transnational Caribbean Community--Beth Mills
• Collateral and Achievement: Land and Caribbean Migration--Margaret Byron