Professor Jean Besson MA PhD

Jean has researched in the Caribbean, publishing on cultural history, peasantry, land, law and development.

Staff details

Position

Emeritus Professor

Department

Anthropology

Email

j.besson (@gold.ac.uk)

Professor Besson has served on the Editorial Board of the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and as chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK, of which she is a founder member (1977) and (since 2010) an elected Honorary Life Member.

She was a founding co-editor of the journal Progress in Development Studies (London: Arnold) and continues as a Life Member of the PIDs Advisory Board. She has been an advisor to the Scottish Executive on census issues of ethnicity (2007) and a member of the Academic Advisory Committee of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum for the Exhibition ‘Breaking the Chains’ (2007-2009) commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade.

She is an Associate Fellow of the Instituteof Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and of the Institute of the Americas, University College London.

Publications and research outputs

Book

Besson, Jean. 2016. Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: Creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica. Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers. ISBN 978-9766374082

Besson, Jean. 2002. Martha Brae's Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0807827347

Edited Book

Besson, Jean and Momsen, Janet, eds. 2007. Caribbean Land and Development Revisited. New York: Palgrave. ISBN 140397392X

Besson, Jean and Olwig, Karen Fog, eds. 2005. Caribbean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity. Oxford: Macmillan. ISBN 1405018798

Book Section

Besson, Jean. 2021. Free Villages. In: Diana Paton and Matthew J. Smith, eds. The Jamaica Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, pp. 163-167. ISBN 9781478011514

Besson, Jean. 2011. Missionaries, planters, and slaves in the age of abolition. In: Stephan Palmié and Francisco A Scarano, eds. The Caribbean: A history of the region and its peoples. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 317-329. ISBN 9780226645087

Besson, Jean. 2011. M. G. Smith’s plural society theory and the challenge of Caribbean creolization. In: Brian Meeks, ed. Caribbean Reasonings: M. G. Smith: Social theory and anthropology in the Caribbean and beyond. Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, pp. 22-42. ISBN 978-976-637-533-1

Article

Besson, Jean. 2018. Sidney W Mintz’s ‘peasantry’ as a critique of capitalism: New evidence from Jamaica. Critique of Anthropology, 38(4), pp. 443-460. ISSN 0308-275X

Besson, Jean. 2018. Review of Almost Home. Maroons between Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica, Nova Scotia, and Sierra Leone by Ruma Chopra. International Review of Social History, 63(3), pp. 526-529. ISSN 0020-8590

Besson, Jean. 2018. Review of In the forests of freedom: the fighting Maroons of Dominica by Lennox Honychurch. Slavery & Abolition, 39(2), pp. 442-444. ISSN 0144-039X

Conference or Workshop Item

Besson, Jean. 2016. 'Transformations of freedom in the land of the Maroons: creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica'. In: 40th Annual Conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies. University of Newcastle 6-8 July 2016 and to UCL institute of the Americas, 12 October 2016.

Besson, Jean. 2015. 'Jamaican hidden histories in Caribbean context: maroons, free villages and ‘squatter’ settlements'. In: Keynote Address. 39th Annual Conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies. The Drum Intercultural Arts Centre, Birmingham, United Kingdom 1-3 July 2015.

Besson, Jean. 2013. 'Transformations of freedom in the land of the Maroons: creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica'. In: Caribbean Research Seminar in the North. University of Newcastle, United Kingdom 10 May 2013 and to the Jamaican Historical Society, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, 11 December 2012.

Research Interests

Professor Jean Besson has carried out research in Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean, publishing on cultural history, peasantries (free villages, informal occupiers and maroons), land, law, development, kinship, gender, narratives, religion, migration and ethnicity.

Her publications include Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Caribbean Narratives of Belonging: Fields of Relations, Sites of Identity, edited with Karen Fog Olwig (Oxford: Macmillan, 2005); Caribbean Land and Development Revisited, edited with Janet Momsen (New York: Palgrave, 2007); and Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: Creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2016).

She is currently writing an ethnography based on long-term fieldwork among informal occupiers in a Jamaican ‘squatter’ settlement.