Caribbean diaspora

Eight months after Hurricane Melissa, the Jamaican diaspora is redefining what it means to build back home — from Windrush reforms in Britain to a landmark diaspora conference in Montego Bay and a global reparations push reshaping Caribbean diplomacy.

Forty-four years since the Chronicle’s first edition. Ninety quarterly editions. Seventy-eight years since the HMT Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury. This special edition takes stock of the community in 2026: what four generations of Black British Caribbean life have built, what the Windrush scandal and its aftermath have revealed and not resolved, and what the community’s fourth and fifth generations are inheriting from those who came before them.

Since January 1982, the Jamaica Windrush & Diaspora Update has published ninety quarterly editions chronicling the life of the Caribbean community in Britain and its ties to Jamaica. Covering forty-four years of history — from the Toxteth riots and the Scarman Report to the Windrush scandal and its aftermath, from Thatcher’s first term to the present — the series constitutes the most sustained quarterly record of Black British life ever assembled. This commemorative edition brings the complete archive together.

There is a particular kind of tiredness that doesn’t come from one bad day, or one difficult week. It comes…

When Hurricane Melissa made landfall in western Jamaica as a historic Category 5 storm, a diaspora scattered across three continents became the island’s first line of relief — even as Jamaica’s petition to King Charles III marked a new chapter in the long struggle for reparatory justice.

A hard truth about time, labour, dignity, and coming home There is a particular kind of tiredness that doesn’t come…

The Price of Paradise Relocating from London to Jamaica often comes with dreams of a slower life, sun-kissed mornings, and…

Author’s Note: The author of this piece has chosen to remain anonymous and does not wish to disclose their identity.…

From London’s Grey to Jamaica’s Gold Relocating from London to Jamaica is often romanticised as a poetic return to ancestral…

As Toronto’s Little Jamaica fights to survive gentrification caused by a decade of transit construction, an independent report on Jamaica exposes gaps in Britain’s Windrush outreach, and the post-coronation debate over Jamaica’s republican future gathers momentum.

The death of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022 sent complex waves through the Jamaican diaspora and across the island itself — accelerating the republic movement, prompting fierce debate about the meaning of grief, and marking the end of an era that connected the Caribbean to the Crown through memory, loyalty and loss.

In March 2022, Prince William arrived in Jamaica to protests and a prime minister who told him Britain was being left behind. Three months later, a bronze family stood in Sunday best atop a pile of suitcases at Waterloo Station — the National Windrush Monument, unveiled by the same prince.

When Barbados became the Caribbean’s newest republic in November 2021, it electrified a conversation about Jamaica’s own constitutional future from Kingston to Brooklyn. In the same month, a damning parliamentary report found that only five per cent of Windrush scandal victims in Britain had received compensation.

In six weeks in the spring of 2020, a pandemic arrived and a man was killed on a street in Minneapolis, and the world the Jamaican diaspora had known changed in ways that are still being measured. The lockdown and George Floyd’s murder defined a generation.

When Boris Johnson entered Downing Street in July 2019 with a promise to deliver Brexit by any means, the Caribbean community in Britain faced a simple and frightening question: what would leaving the European Union mean for people whose right to be here had already proved more fragile than anyone had admitted?