Book excerpt: Planning the Past studies the way a post-colonial society reconstructs its national history and grapples with its colonial past, specifically in Port Royal, a Jamaican village with a dramatic history of pirates, naval admirals, and earthquakes. The plans for Port Royal's heritage tourism development represent a chronological record of historical revisionism, and the fact that none of the plans has been realized reflects post-colonial social processes and national ambivalence about piratical and naval history.