Professor Jean Besson MA PhD

Jean Besson studied Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (MA Honours 1967, PhD 1974) and taught at the Universities of Edinburgh (1974-76) and Aberdeen (1976-90) before teaching at Goldsmiths from 1991-2014. In the Goldsmiths Anthropology Department, she established courses on the ethnography and social anthropology of the Caribbean Region across a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. She also contributed to the MA Applied Anthropology and Community and Youth Work and the University of London’s MA in Caribbean and Latin American Studies. In 2014, she gave the Annual Gold Lecture in Anthropology at Goldsmiths. 

Jean has held visiting appointments at the University of the West Indies (Mona, Jamaica and St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago) and the Johns Hopkins University, USA, and is an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Latin American Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and the Institute of the Americas, University College London. 

A founding co-editor of the journal Progress in Development Studies (London: Arnold), Professor Besson has also 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 an advisor to the Scottish Executive on census issues of ethnicity (2007), and an academic advisor and contributor to the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum’s exhibition ‘Breaking the Chains’ (2007-2009) commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of the British transatlantic slave trade. 

In 2024, Professor Besson served as a consultant to Transatlantic Trafficked Enslaved African Corrective Historical (TTEACH) Plaques for designing the ‘Black Lives Matter’ plaque installed in Deptford Town Hall acknowledging the lives of Africans trafficked by Britain and their descendants consigned to chattel slavery. The plaque marks Deptford Town Hall as a Site of Conscience, supported by teaching and research at Goldsmiths.     

Her recent book, Building Zion: Narratives and Strategies of Development in a Jamaican ‘Squatter’ Settlement (Kingston & Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2025), highlighting the development of ‘captured land’ in informal settlements, completes a trilogy of ethnographies based on research in Jamaica. Previous books in the ethnographic trilogy are Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: Creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica (Kingston & Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2016), which discusses maroons with sacred common land and Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) focusing on post-slavery villages with ‘family land’.  

Research Interests

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

Her recent book, Building Zion: Narratives and Strategies of Development in a Jamaican ‘Squatter’ Settlement (Kingston & Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2025), highlighting the development of ‘captured land’ in informal settlements, completes a trilogy of ethnographies based on research in Jamaica. Previous books in the ethnographic trilogy are Transformations of Freedom in the Land of the Maroons: Creolization in the Cockpits, Jamaica (Kingston & Miami: Ian Randle Publishers, 2016), which discusses maroons with common land and Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) focusing on post-slavery villages with ‘family land’.  

Together, these three ethnographies show that common land in maroon communities, family land in free villages, and captured land in squatter settlements are variants of customary tenures found across the Caribbean region. Such small-scale landholdings, rooted in community, kinship and a history of slave resistance (as opposed to being based on law), reflect dynamic processes of peasantization and Caribbean culture-building. These Afro-Creole tenures are transforming the legacy of the large-scale colonial slave-plantation system, rather than being obstacles to development as Eurocentric perspectives suggest. 

Other publications include Land and Development in the Caribbean, edited with Janet Momsen (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987); 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 several book chapters and journal articles (1979-2024). 

Professor Besson has also presented approximately ninety invited papers, visiting lectures and keynote lectures at conferences, workshops and seminars in the UK (England and Scotland), Europe (Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden), the Caribbean (Barbados, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago) and the USA over a period of fifty years from 1975-2025.