Academic literature on the topic 'Marshall Islands. Parliament'

In 1706, Jamaica's provost marshal received a writ of escheat from the island's Supreme Court of Judicature. The writ directed him to empanel a jury of “Twelve and Lawful Men of the Neighbourhood” who would determine whether the slaves of James Whitchurch, a Jamaican merchant, should be escheated—returned—to the Crown. Did the “Negro Woman Slave Commonly Called Catalina” and her “Seaven Pickaninny” belong to Whitchurch, or could Queen Anne claim her prerogative right to an escheat because the previous owner of the slaves, Charles Delamaine, had died without an heir? The jury found in the Crown's favor, but a dissatisfied Whitchurch petitioned Queen Anne for relief, asking her to return the slaves and quiet his title. Whitchurch's petition, the first Jamaican escheat case to come before the Queen, sparked a transatlantic legal controversy as colonists, Assembly members, and imperial officials weighed the Crown's prerogative right to escheats against local political grievances and the Board of Trade's desire to encourage West Indian settlement and trade. This seemingly mundane conflict over property law quickly acquired constitutional significance, generating the kind of rights talk so familiar to early American historians: Jamaican colonists claimed the rights of Englishmen, and the Jamaican Assembly asserted an institutional capacity akin to Parliament. In this article, I contextualize colonists' rights talk, rooting their claims to English rights in concerns about the administration of property law during a crucial liminal moment in Jamaican history. As the colony transitioned from a small-scale to a large-scale plantation economy and from a society with slaves to a slave society, property and the law that governed it became the focus of intense political conflict.

Parliaments in the Pacific Islands are among the most male-dominated in the world. Yet despite the odds, there is a cohort of women who have been elected and won senior roles. This article adds to an emerging literature that examines the gendered pathways to political influence in the region by focusing on the hitherto overlooked role of the opposition leader. It uses a biographical approach to consider the pathways in and through this role by four women opposition leaders: Fiame Naomi Mata’afa (Samoa), Hilda Heine (Marshall Islands), Dame Carol Kidu (Papua New Guinea), and Ro Teimumu Kepa (Fiji). We parse out factors that explain the success of these leaders while also identifying barriers that have prevented their emergence in other Pacific states. We identify two main ways in which women politicians have used the position of leader of the opposition: first, the conventional understanding of the role as a path to power; and second, the less well-understood role of defending and protecting democratic norms and institutions. The latter can be interpreted as a version of the “glass cliff” phenomenon where women leaders assume key positions in times of crisis. Our findings thus highlight that while in the Pacific the role of leader of the opposition can be a path to power, the relatively few women leaders who have taken on this role have used it in diverse and varied ways.