Article
The nine years since the publication of the last volume of The Jamaican Historical Review constitute the longest hiatus in the journal’s history. Volume 27, although bearing the date 2015, was not in fact printed until 2017. Work on a subsequent volume had begun while Volume 27 was still making its way into print, but was ultimately brought to a halt by the COVID-19 pandemic, together with financial and administrative difficulties experienced by the journal’s publisher, the Jamaican Historical Society.
Unwilling to allow the important work of scholars of Jamaican history to remain unpublished, I resolved, following my election as Honorary Editor of the Jamaican Historical Society in June 2025, to revive the Review and bring the outstanding volume to publication. I am particularly grateful to the former Editor, Professor James Robertson, for entrusting me with the manuscripts. The contents of this volume are the product of Professor Robertson’s editorship between 2015 and 2020, together with the work of his then Co-Editor, Dr Julian Cresser, to both of whom full credit is due.
The volume was originally intended to contain three research articles. Understandably, in the intervening years, two of the authors chose to publish their work elsewhere. The third, Dr Aaron Graham, sadly died in 2023. This volume is therefore dedicated to his memory, and to those of Professor Sir Roy Augier (d. 2025) and Professor David Buisseret (d. 2026).
In preparing the volume for publication after such a lengthy interval, I have benefited greatly from the moral and practical support of the historians who have joined the journal’s newly constituted Editorial Board. I am equally grateful to the other officers of the Society for their support in restoring the Review to publication.
In the Editorial to Volume 27, Professor Robertson and Dr Cresser announced that the Review would return to publishing non-thematic volumes, following a period in which every volume published between 1971 and 2013 had been devoted to a particular theme. This volume, and those that follow, will uphold that decision. The Review will henceforth serve as a general journal of Jamaican history, welcoming scholarship across the full range of the island’s history and historiography.
The most substantial change introduced with this volume, however, concerns the method of publication. Previously, the Review was published exclusively in print, with most readers accessing it through subscription. With the adoption of a new publishing platform provided by the Swiss publisher MDPI, the Review will now be published online and made freely available on an open-access basis, without an article processing charge for authors. This change promises to transform not only how the Review is published, but also how it is read, and we hope that it will extend the journal’s reach to new audiences while encouraging submissions from a wider range of scholars.
The centrepiece of Volume 28 is a historiographical comparison of Irish penal laws and Jamaican slave codes by the late Dr Graham. It is followed by an interview with the late Sir Roy Augier, the Saint Lucian historian who spent much of his career in Jamaica and who was instrumental, among other things, in helping to establish an indigenous history curriculum in Anglophone Caribbean schools. The volume also contains six book reviews. Although, by virtue of the delay in publication, these now constitute something of a time capsule, they nevertheless represent an important engagement with the literature on Jamaican history.
The Review will issue a call for papers in the coming year, and we look forward to welcoming submissions from scholars working across the field of Jamaican history. Further information will be available on the journal’s new website: https://jhr.jams.pub/.
— Andrew Williams
October 2026