Digitising the endangered archives of Grenada (EAP295)

This project seeks to digitise the unique historical archives of Grenada which record the island's significance at the intersection of the British and French Empires during the second half of the eighteenth century, and provide a rare vision of how the Windward Islands experienced the transition from slavery to emancipation during the mid-nineteenth century.

The project focuses on digitising 132 volumes of deed records and local government correspondence which provide a crucial source for understanding the major political, social and economic transformations of the Southern Caribbean. These rare sources can also be used to reconstruct the experiences of the everyday and subaltern lives.

The material provides a micro-vision of how Grenada was transformed in the late eighteenth century by imperial conflicts, the expansion of plantation slavery and revolutionary politics. The Supreme Court records reveal the multi-racial alliances and conflicts that marked slave society while Government House correspondence expresses the local negotiations and conflicts that shaped the prolonged transition to a free society during the mid nineteenth century. The French Records are held in a storeroom of the registry and have suffered considerably from heat, humidity, fading and corrosion. The papers are extremely brittle, the text is beginning to discolour, and the bindings are in danger of damage due to cramped storage conditions.