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The Enduring, Gilded Periphery: Colonialism and Grand Cayman in Capital's Atlantic World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

N. D. B. Connolly*
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
*
*Corresponding author. Email: nconnol2@jhu.edu

Extract

The man they called “Smiley” died in February 1938 on an operating table in Kingston, Jamaica. His stomach cancer, only recently discovered, was quickly deemed inoperable by a doctor in the Cayman Islands, where he lived with his pregnant wife and four children. In Cayman, there had been no public hospital. Instead, a British heiress paid to build a four-bed emergency ward and dispensary meant to serve the island's 6,500 residents. Four beds for more than six thousand. Such insufficiency represented the extent of institutionalized health care at the edge of the British Empire.

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

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References

Notes

1 Interview with Reginald King Connolly, conducted by Tricia Bodden, Nov. 23, 2016, Rum Point, Grand Cayman, BWI.

2 “Grand Cayman Celebrates,” The Daily Gleaner, May 27, 1937, 11.

3 Quesnel Albunyan Connolly, “A Geographical Survey of Grand Cayman Island—British West Indies” (Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 1940), 81.

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10 Informed by the insights of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot and the conceptual failings of the historian John Higham, I use the language of “periphery” here ironically and intentionally, in full knowledge of its racial implications—really, its constructedness—with the North Atlantic presumed to be “center.” Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “North Atlantic Universals: Analytic Fictions, 1492–1945,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (Fall 2002): 839–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Higham, John, “The Future of American History,” Journal of American History 80:4 (Mar. 1994): 12891309CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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76 Michael Brostek, “Cayman Islands: Business and Tax Advantages Attract U.S. Persons and Enforcement Challenges Exist,” Government Accountability Office (July 2008), 2–3. Tax havens often see such concentrations of registered companies under one address. At 1209 Orange Street in Wilmington, Delaware, some 285,000 different corporations “reside.”

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85 “Overdetermined from without” comes from Franz Fanon's “The Fact of Blackness” (1952). I reference it here to draw parallels between the Caymanian condition and the more general black condition under colonialism.

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