The UWI Mona experience as an international postgrad student

The Caribbean Historical Research Unit room, which I used as a de facto study space during my first semester.

I have been a registered student of the University of the West Indies, Mona, for about ten months now. Not long after I arrived, I was warned by a couple people that UWI was a bureaucratic nightmare. I am pleased to say that, so far, my experience has not been all that bad. In this post I will outline some of my highlights and issues about the university to date.

As I outlined in my previous blog posts, my experience pre-arrival was not perfect. It took a very long time for the history department to administratively deal with my application (my course, the MPhil History, had technically been closed to applications in the year prior to my arrival). I had no meaningful response for months from Marlene Hamilton Hall, the accommodation for postgraduates, and so, four weeks before I left the UK, I paid the deposit and first month’s rent to Leslie Robinson Hall, a hall operated by a private company (138 Student Living). They subsequently ‘lost’ my payment until two weeks before I arrived, and were basically useless in facilitating my arrival. I had to pay $40 USD for an airport transfer from JUTA, even though 138 claimed to offer an airport transfer service.

That brings me up to my arrival. UWI, Mona provides almost no support tailored to international students. I was very lucky to find that I was not the only non-Caribbean international student arriving - there were four undergraduates from the University of Birmingham, among others, who were on a year abroad. Thus, we struggled to get to grips with things together for the first few weeks. Help was minimal from UWI, such as the International Students Office, which has provided no direction or assistance whatsoever in the course of my studies, other than to organise an Extension of Stay on my passport, for which it was actually quite useful.

The staff of the History and Archaeology Department have been very pleasant to deal with for all matters in which they could help, although the lack of graduate history researchers in recent years meant that most of the faculty were unprepared for someone like me. I was the only new graduate student in this academic year. There is no real graduate student community, in any meaningful sense, for the humanities. One reason for this is that many students take research degrees part-time, not full-time, like myself. No one from the department, faculty, or Office of Graduate Studies ever reaches out to me or asks for my feedback or opinion on any matter at all. The History and Archaeology department’s seminar series is a welcome oasis, and one of the only things that makes me feel part of the department at all. The other are the periodical field trips - I managed to visit Port Royal, Woodside (St. Mary parish), and the Blue Mountains as part of field trips this year, which has been a very nice and instructive experience for me.

Newcastle looking down on Kingston. From the history department field trip to the Blue Mountains.

Probably the highlight of my experience at UWI has been the Main Library. Although it is not perfect, the open shelf history, reference, and periodical collections are rather good. The West Indies and Special Collections, likewise, is a gem. I even worked there for a couple of months cataloguing a couple boxes of the Hugh Shearer papers. I do wish the library would be more proactive in taking out books from the Reserve Book Collection which are not on reading lists and putting them back on the open shelves. I also dislike the recent trend of buying ebooks instead of physical books (for instance, Jack Greene’s edition of James Knight’s history of Jamaica is only available through the library as an ebook with no pagination). Having moved away from campus at new year’s, I don’t really borrow books anymore, which is probably my biggest loss from moving off campus.  The fact the Post Graduate Learning Commons has been closed since before I arrived, and remains so with no opening date in sight, was a major let down in my first semester. The only postgraduate study space on campus is part of the Engineering Library, which I have to admit I never visited, perhaps to my loss. Fortunately, I have been able to use the Caribbean Historical Research Unit (formerly the Social History Project) room, which belongs to the department.

I did experience a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare when I tried to get my Sagicor/UWI health insurance card. The insurance is one benefit of the compulsory miscellaneous fees that you pay as a student each year (approx. 100 GBP). I was never contacted to be told that the card was ready to be picked up, although I realised that the cards were being distributed at the Undercroft on the centre of campus. Eventually, I went to speak to the Sagicor representative, who searched for the card but couldn’t find it. I filled out a form, and went away. I visited two more times over the course of a handful of weeks before I did my own research and contacted the HR Department, who are technically responsible for the cards. After a week or two longer, I was told that the card would now be there. Finally, I was able to pick up my card in January 2023, months after I had started at the university. There was no explanation for why it wasn’t there for weeks when it should have been. Fortunately I have had no medical emergencies, although I was able to use the card to get $500 off a medical exam for my provisional driver’s licence.

UWI, Mona has many flaws in its design, and isn’t always the safest place, although it remains more walkable than pretty much everywhere else in Kingston (other than Hope Gardens). The postgraduate students’ union has a presence near to nil, and there is no proactive contact or support from anyone in the university’s hierarchy. Certainly, it is easy to feel alone or abandoned by the system. I am lucky in that I have yet to face a major problem.

Would I recommend attending UWI, Mona as a postgraduate research student from outside the Caribbean? Not unless you are prepared, mentally, to deal with everything by yourself. If you are, then at least it’s got a pretty decent library.

End-of-year round-up: Research Progress

Working on deeds in the Island Records Office.

My last post on this research blog was in October last year. Suffice to say, much has happened since.

My weekly or fortnightly updates tapered off as my workload for my classes increased. The classes, HIST 6003 - Historiography and the Emergence of West Indian History, taught by Professor Kathleen Monteith, and HIST 6701 - History and Heritage: Theory and Applications, with Professor James Robertson, finished at the start of December. I was a solo student in the latter, and one of only two in the former. Both classes were interesting and did a lot to expand my understanding of the history of Jamaica and the Caribbean. With Prof. Monteith I got a good grounding in the historiography of Jamaica and the West Indies up to the late 1990s, which was, perhaps, the peak of the UWI, Mona history department. We covered material from Edward Long through to Eric Williams and Barry Higman. The great explosion in history-writing about Jamaica that has come in the last twenty years was not very well covered (although, there’s so much it’s pretty hard to get a grasp - it would probably have taken a whole other semester. I only know of Trevor Burnard who has even attempted this feat). In Prof. Robertson’s class, I benefited from a diverse reading list. Some of the most interesting things I read were outside the period of my studies, such as Born Fi’ Dead by Laurie Gunst and an interview with Richard Hart in an early volume of Small Axe. After the classes ended at the start of December, I was heavily invested in finishing the coursework, which was very time-consuming. The last of Prof. Monteith’s coursework was submitted in mid-January. I have the results from her class, and I was fortunate enough to get an A grade, which I am very pleased with. Prof. Robertson's grades took a bit longer to reach but I also managed to achieve an A.

With the end of my classwork in January (N.B. I do have to complete another course next academic year on Oral History), I was able to begin my thesis research, and see what I could find and what directions I could take a topic so broad as ‘merchants of Kingston in the eighteenth-century’. Unfortunately, the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town was still closed from the start of October, and with no reopening date in sight, I arranged to visit the Island Records Office instead. While that arrangement was being made, I started working on some pdfs of CO 142 from the UK National Archives, better known as the Naval Office Shipping Lists (NOSL) for Jamaica. I have, so far, transcribed these shipping lists from 1698-1719. My hope is to bring my transcription up to 1752, so I can merge the data with a set from Peter Pellizzari, formerly of Harvard. Anyone who has looked at Naval Office Shipping Lists will agree that they are a fantastic source, although not comprehensive. Working on the NOSL alone is appealing, but has been done before - not just by Pellizzari, but by Yu Wu in his 1990s thesis at Johns Hopkins. While I hope the NOSL can be a major source of economic data for my thesis, I have to use it in conjunction with other material. I highlighted some of the flaws in using the NOSL in a seminar paper I presented at the end of March, focusing on its representation of contraband trade.

After securing access to the Island Records Office (IRO), I began working on their records. After a quick assessment, I decided to focus on deeds, hoping to find evidence of the economic activities of Kingston merchants while they were still alive (as opposed to using probate records like inventories and wills to see their wealth at death). I quickly discovered what a difficult task this would be. There are about 220 deed books covering the period 1692-1770, each with approx. 300 pages and approx. 200 deeds. That makes about 44,000 deeds to check individually to see if they were made by someone of the parish of Kingston. Even if the entire collection was digitised and OCR’d, that would be a very difficult task. Needless to say, I had to reduce my expectations significantly. After calling two or three books to get an idea of the content, I discovered that in the earliest books following the earthquake of 1692 a great deal of deeds were being enrolled as William Beeston selling plots of Kingston. I decided that my first task should be to collate all of these deeds, and in the process get a pretty good understanding of how Kingston was developed in the period 1693-1695. After finishing this, I began sampling the deeds at intervals of 20 deed books. I was able to get some good examples of the buying and selling of urban enslaved, the transfer of property in Kingston, and the involvement of merchants in transferring or mortgaging plantations. I feel like there is far more to be done with the deeds, and as much as I wish I could spend all day going through them, that simply is not an option. When I return to them, my approach has to be far more targeted to get something worthwhile from them.

I have also been able to do some research in the National Library and in the Jamaica Archives, since the latter reopened at the start of April. The transcribed Council minutes in the National Library will be invaluable - far easier to use and less fragile than those in the Jamaica Archives, and far closer than those in the UK National Archives! I can see myself dipping into the National Library collections later in my research to hoover up miscellaneous manuscripts, newspapers, and possibly early printed books. At the Jamaica Archives, I looked at the Inventories - a favourite of visiting researchers to Jamaica. I did, however, find them somewhat boring. Perhaps material history is not for me? I also looked at the Crop Accounts, specifically, the earliest volume. This I found to be far more interesting, especially the periodical accounts of to whom each plantation sold their goods, and I feel there will be a lot to be done with this. If I am lucky, I may even be able to draw some connections to the NOSL. The parish/vestry records are quite interesting and working with the Kingston poll and parish taxes is tempting, although it has been done before by Wilma Bailey in the 1970s. If I was to do the same, I would have to be sure I was not duplicating what she had achieved. Instead, I have found the tax lists on transient merchants to be very useful for my purposes, and I have never seen them cited before. There are some miscellaneous parish records, like a toll book of slaves sold from 1738-1743, which I hope to be able to use and might shine a light on specific aspects of what I am hoping to discover (that particular manuscript is out for repair). Beyond the crop accounts, inventories, and parish records, there are many others I would like to explore - the chancery court records, the powers of attorney, and the vice-admiralty court records.

The microfilm reader at West Indies and Special Collections, UWI Mona Library. The best in Jamaica and fantastic for using the extensive 5o-year-old collection built up by K. E. Ingram.

Other than physical material, research like mine demands working with digitised archives. I have been fortunate enough to secure access to a digital version of CO 137 from the UK National Archives, although I have yet to mine it for useful information. Efforts to digitise archives mean I can access the Bright Family Papers (in Australia), the Satterthwaite Letter Books (in the UK), and the Thistlewood Papers (in USA) all from the comfort of my desk in Kingston. Digitisation is not perfect, however, and different libraries/archives allow different levels of usability. Just because something has been digitised, if it has no index, it can still be very hard to use. Working with digitised material also means you have to have the quality technology to match, and a reasonable work desk and environment for long hours at a laptop or computer, which can be unaffordable for a graduate student.

So, where does one go from here? Having had some time to study the sources on the ground in Jamaica, I have decided to focus more on the economic aspect of eighteenth-century Jamaica, rather than tackling any social subjects. To keep the project manageable, I intend to restrict the sources I use, likely to the inventories, crop accounts, deed books, and the NOSL. Using sampling, I can get a picture of Jamaica's growth and development from the year 1700 and I can cut my research off at 1775, at which point the American Revolution materially changed the economic situation of the Atlantic world. I hope this new approach could be a manageable contribution to literature on Jamaica's wealth, the large integrated plantation model, and the causes of the British Industrial Revolution.