Professor Colin Clarke

Professor Colin Clarke is an Emeritus Professor at Oxford University and an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. He has taught at the Universities of Toronto, and Liverpool where he was, until 1981, Reader in Geography and Latin American Studies. He carried out numerous field investigations in Mexico and the Caribbean, and has published over 20 books and more than 120 papers and book chapters. In 2011-12 he was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. The results of this research have been published as Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Caribbean Slavery and the Holocaust in Germany and the Occupied Territories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

He is the author of Jamaica in Maps (University of London Press, 1974), Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-1962 (University of California Press, 1975), East Indians in a West Indian Town: San Fernando, 1930-1970 (Allen and Unwin, 1986), Class, Ethnicity and Community in Southern Mexico: Oaxaca's Peasantries (Oxford University Press, 2000), Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-2002 (Ian Randle Publishers, 2006), Decolonising the Colonial City: Urbanization and Stratification in Kingston, Jamaica (Oxford University Press, 2006), Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) co-authored with Gillian Clarke; Race, Class and the Politics of Decolonization: Jamaica Journals, 1961 and 1968 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), and Mexico and the Caribbean Under Castro's Eyes: A Journal of Decolonization, State Formation & Democratization (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), East Indians in a West Indian Town: San Fernando, Trinidad, 1930-1970 ( Routledge Revivals, 2023), editor of Society and Politics in the Caribbean (St Anthony's / Macmillan 1991), co-author of A Geography of the Third World (Methuen, 1983; second edition Routledge, 1996), and co-editor of Geography and Ethnic Pluralism (Allen and Unwin, 1984), Politics, Security and Development in Small States (Allen and Unwin, 1987), and South Asians Overseas (Cambridge, 1990).

Professor Clarke has been an editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research, and a member of the editorial board of the Third World Planning Review, the European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Cahiers d'Outre Mer. He was Chairman of the Society for Caribbean Studies, UK (and a Life Member since 2004); President of the European Association for Research on Central America and the Caribbean (and President for Life); and Chairman of the Society for Latin American Studies, UK. He received the Gold Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1999, and in 2003 was 'lifted up' by Sri Chinmoi to mark his contribution to human development in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2004 he was awarded the degree of D.Litt., Oxford in recognition of his research and publications on Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2019 the Tutorial Fellowship in Physical Geography at Jesus College was named the Paul Paget Colin Clarke Fellowship. Paul Paget was a Lecturer in Geography at Oxford and Fellow of Jesus; he, too, was a Caribbean specialist, Colin Clarke's tutor and doctoral supervisor, and they served the college sequentially as Fellows for a period of 46 years.

At Oxford Professor Clarke has been a Tutor for Admissions at Jesus College, Chairman of the Faculty Board of Anthropology and Geography, Chairman of the Inter-Faculty Committee for Latin-American Studies, and Head of the School of Geography and the Environment.

Professor Clarke’s research interests include urbanization in developing countries, especially the Caribbean and Latin America; race, ethnicity and class; peasantries; and the problems of small, recently decolonized states. His regions of specialization are Latin America and the Caribbean, and more recently Central Europe. He is a geographer whose research interests intersect with history, anthropology and sociology.

His first major book Kingston Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change, 1692-1962, based on his Oxford doctorate while a graduate at Jesus College, was published by the University of California Press in 1975. That book traced the evolution of Kingston’s society from slavery to emancipation, and ultimately to the eve of Jamaica’s independence in 1962. In 2011-12 he was invited to become a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, where he carried out his own research on the Holocaust. The ensuing book, Racist Regimes, Forced Labour and Death: British Slavery in the Caribbean and the Holocaust in Germany and Occupied Europe (Palgrave Macmillan,2024), based on his two case studies, followed by a synthesised conclusion, has been published in Göttingen’s Global Diversities series.

Both British and German Nazi empires used slavery and forced labour to target and persecute their racial and ethnic victims, having determined the outcome – often death – by denying them any semblance of civil liberties. Each system was introduced by an expansionist European power, through racist enslavement, transportation, dehumanisation and the destruction of human life.

However, the construction and operation of Caribbean sugar plantations by African and Creole slave labour in the 17^th and 18^th centuries was different from the mass murder of Jewish and Gypsy civilians in Europe (the Holocaust) and their use as forced labour to manufacture armaments during the Second World War. The contrast is expressed in the following trajectories: for the Caribbean, slave capture in Africa, forced migration across the Middle Passage, sale, seasoning, and being worked to an early death in the gang system of the sugar plantations; and for Occupied Europe, forced migration and forced labour for Jews and Gypsies, where the majority died in work ghettos, or by shooting or gassing, and the remainder were subjected to industrial forced labour in SS concentration camps engaged on Nazi ‘miracle projects’.

Differentiated as these two events are, however, there is a basis – even a moral need – for comparison, which in this instance rests on four common denominators — racism, colonialism/occupation, slavery/forced labour and death. In combination these four elements led inexorably to crimes against humanity and genocide. The juxtaposition of these two historical cases has deep political implications. Both British Caribbean slavery and the Holocaust have given rise to appeals for reparations. But only the Caribbean planters of the post-emancipation era and the victims of the Holocaust since the Second World War have so far received compensation.