The British Empire and the Postcolonial Caribbean

About the lecture

In this lecture we think about the history of the British Empire and the Caribbean, focusing in particular on: (i) the evolution of the British Empire from its beginnings in the 1530s (with the expansion of the kingdom of Henry VIII into Wales and Ireland) to the present day; (ii) the geographical differences between the various islands in the Caribbean, including the difference between the large islands of the Greater Antilles and the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles, and the difference between the western (Caribbean-facing) and eastern (Atlantic-facing) coasts of the islands in the Lesser Antilles; (iii) the history of population change in the Caribbean, including the disappearance of the indigenous populations of Caribs and Arawaks, the arrival of white Europeans (largely a matter of choice) and black Africans (enslaved and forcibly transported); (iv) the historical differences between individual islands in the Caribbean, including the date at which the island’s founding slave population was imported, and number of times each island changed colonial hands; (v) the extent to which the differences between different islands promoted different kinds of creative expression, including theatre among larger population centres (e.g. Jamaica, Trinidad) and novels and poetry elsewhere (e.g. St Lucia).

About the lecturer

Born in Bristol, and educated at Oxford and St Louis, Dr John Lennard has taught English, American, and Commonwealth Literature in Cambridge, London, and Jamaica over more than twenty years. He has written two widely used textbooks (on poetry and drama) and monographs on Shakespeare, Paul Scott, Nabokov, and Faulkner, as well as two collections of essays on contemporary genre writers in crime, science fiction and fantasy, and romance. Enthusiastic, discursive, widely knowledgeable, and a demon for punctuation (on which he has also published extensively), he has been a popular Summer School Course Leader and lecturer for the Institute of Continuing Education since 1992.