Gad J. Heuman

Gad J Heuman studied at Columbia College and Yale University. He is currently (2012) Professor in the History Department and is a past Director of the Centre for Caribbean Studies at Warwick.

Prof. Heuman is Editor of the journal, Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies as well as of the related book series, Studies in Slave and Post-Slave Societies and Cultures published by Routledge. He is also co-editor of the Warwick University Caribbean Studies series published by Macmillan Caribbean.

Professor Heuman has been Chairman of the Society for Caribbean Studies in the UK and continues to serve on the Society's Executive Committee. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has had various fellowships and grants, including the Rockefeller Residency Fellowship in the Program in Atlantic History, Culture and Society at Johns Hopkins University. He has given papers and commentaries at many conferences and seminars in Britain, Europe, the United States and the Caribbean.

Professor Heuman's initial research was on the free people of colour in Jamaica, which examined the politics and social position of the free coloureds during slavery and after emancipation. He then began to work on slave and post-emancipation resistance; subsequently, he edited a collection on resistance and marronage in Africa and the New World and also co-edited a book on labour in the Caribbean from slavery to the modern period.

Professor Heuman's interest in resistance led him to investigate the most important post-emancipation rebellion in the nineteenth-century Caribbean, the Morant Bay Rebellion. This black-led rebellion had significant ramifications in the Caribbean. It was evidence of the difficulties faced by blacks after emancipation and led to a fundamental change in the political relationship between Britain and her Caribbean colonies.

Selected Publications: Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloureds in Jamaica, 1792-1865 (Westport, Conn. and Oxford, 1981)

Book cover for 'The Killing Time'The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London and Knoxville, 1994).

A Short History of the Caribbean (Hodder Arnold, 2006).

He has edited or co-edited four books:

Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World (London,1986)

Labour in the Caribbean: From Emancipation to Independence (London, 1988).

The Slavery Reader (2003)

Contresting Freedom: Control and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean (2005)

Professor Heuman has published many articles; among the most recent are two chapters in the Oxford History of the British Empire ("The British West Indies, 1815-1914" and "Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Abolition") and a chapter in the UNESCO History of the Caribbean ("The Social Structure of the Slave Societies in the Caribbean").