Editors: Winston F. McGowan, James G. Rose, David A. Granger

This book focuses on some of the major developments in the history of the African-Guyanese people from the time of their arrival in what were then the Dutch colonies of Essequibo and Berbice in the first half of the seventeenth century, to the present day. Most African-Guyanese today are descendants of enslaved Africans who were victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade – the forced migration of millions of Africans, largely from West Africa to the Americas, from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. These captives were not uncivilised barbarians, as some European writers assumed and asserted. Rather, they were members of societies which had been distinguished by significant achievements. They were, therefore, able to make a valuable contribution to the land to which they were taken against their will after a traumatic journey across the Atlantic.

Themes in African-Guyanese History seeks to deal in a more or less balanced way with the four phases into which historians have often divided Guyanese history, namely: the pre-Emancipation period, which ended in 1838; the post-Emancipation period, in the remainder of the nineteenth century; the pre-Independence period, up to 1966; and the post-Independence period for the remainder of the twentieth century. This book is not a history of the entire African-Guyanese experience. There is certainly scope for the publication of a supplementary volume dealing primarily with social and cultural history.

• 216 x 140 mm
• 492 pages
• Paperback