Barry W. Higman

On 30 September 1943, Higman was born in Wagga Wagga, Australia. For his post-secondary education, he graduated from the University of Sydney in 1967 with a Bachelor of Arts before obtaining Doctor of Philosophy degrees at the University of the West Indies in 1967 and the University of Liverpool in 1971.[1]

Higman began his academic career in 1971 teaching at the University of the West Indies as a lecturer. He took a leave of absence in the late 1970s when he became a fellow at Princeton University in the history department.[2] During his academic career, Higman wrote multiple books focusing on Caribbean history including Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834, which was awarded the 1977 Bancroft Prize. Higman resumed his teaching with UWI in the late 1970s and became a history professor with the university in 1983.[1] While working in history, Higman completed a three-year tenure as the history department chair in the mid 1980s and the early 1990s. In 1996, Higman left UWI to become a teacher at the Australian National University before his retirement in 2014.[3]

Higman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 for studies in Iberian and Latin American history.[4] Outside of the United States, Higman became a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1988 and received the Musgrave Medal in 1992.[5][6]

• Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834
• How Food Made History
• A Concise History of the Caribbean
• Plantation Jamaica, 1750-1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy
• Jamaican Food
• Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom 1739-1912
• Jamaican Place Names
• Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries