The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World

Diana Paton's Cultural Politics of Obeah, published by Cambridge University Press in 2015, is the leading current scholarly history of Obeah, tracing how the category was defined and prosecuted across the Anglophone Caribbean from the era of slavery into the twentieth century. Paton is a professor of Caribbean history at the University of Edinburgh with a long publication record on Caribbean slavery, gender and law. Its strength is that it treats Obeah as a legal and political category with its own history rather than assuming it names one fixed practice, drawing on court records, colonial statutes and newspaper coverage across multiple islands and periods. Its limit is that it is a work of legal and political history rather than an ethnography of practice, so a claim about Obeah's specific ritual content needs a different kind of source.