Digitising the endangered archives of Grenada

Dr Laurence Brown, University of Manchester
2009 award – major project
£39,297 for 21 months

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.

Government House correspondence was displaced by Hurricane Ivan which resulted in significant loss, and the disruption of its original listing order. The Public Library lost parts of its roof in 2004 which have yet to be fully repaired. Its fragmented newspaper holdings are extremely rare.

The French Deed Records provide a unique vision of the social complexity of Grenadian society as it was being transformed into a plantation colony during the late eighteenth century. They provide a valuable source for tracing the personal trajectories of migrants from Africa, Europe and elsewhere in the Caribbean and for understanding how the social and economic relationships between Grenada’s white, black and large mixed race population were being transformed during this period. The Letter Books of Grenada’s Colonial Secretary offer a detailed narrative of local events which is particularly significant given the limited and fragmented collections of local newspapers held by Grenada’s Public Library and the British Library. These papers provide a revealing counterpoint of local debates to the official correspondence of the Governor held in the National Archives at Kew. The inter-island correspondence of the Governor in Chief of the Windward Islands during the transition of emancipation is a crucial source for social, political and economic history of the Southern Caribbean, which has remained unused by historians despite the excellent scholarship of Woodville Marshall and Bridget Brereton on the region.

Digitising these records would enable public and scholarly access to these materials not only in Grenada and Britain, but also elsewhere in the Southern Caribbean, where these records would be of considerable interest in St Vincent, St Lucia, Martinique and Trinidad.

The project will begin with the newspaper collection of the Grenada Public Library as this allows for a small discrete collection through which project members can be trained in best practice for digitisation and the management of meta-data. During the second third of the project the French Deeds will be digitised while the archival researcher re-orders the Government House  correspondence in preparation for later digitisation.

Digital copies of the rare deed records, local government correspendence and local newspapers will be deposited with the National Archives of Grenada and the British Library; the Government House correspondence and Registry records will be ordered and preserved in archival boxes; a digital photographer and archival researcher will be trained in current best practice; and two training sessions on best practice in digitisation and digital records management will be open to relevant professionals within and outside Grenada – it is hoped these would attract public sector personnel from across the Eastern Caribbean.