Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence
AM217
Lecture: The Caribbean – historical overview
Lecture plan
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Introductory quiz, part 1: Histories
Caribbean histories
‘Imaginative geographies’
Introductory quiz, part 2: Fantasies
The Caribbean and the wider world
i.
Globalisation and the Caribbean
Introductory quiz, part 1: Histories
In pairs, I want you to spend a few minutes attempting this introductory quiz. I
do not expect you to know a great deal about the history of the Caribbean at
this stage, but do your best; I think you will be surprised how much you know
and can work out. Try to match up the following dates to the historical events
below (labelled A-K):
1. 600 CE
2. 1492 CE
3. 1647 CE
4. 1791 CE
5. 1834 CE
6. 1898 CE
7. 1959 CE
8. 1962 CE
9. 1999 CE
10. 2004 CE
11. 2007 CE
12. 2016 CE
A. A slave revolt in the French colony of Saint Domingue marks the
beginning of the Haitian Revolution
B. Fidel Castro comes to power after the Cuban Revolution
C. First sugar produced in Barbados sent to England
D. Human beings settle Jamaica
E. The 50th anniversary of Barbados’ independence and the 200 th
anniversary of the ‘Bussa’s’ slave rebellion on the same island
F. Jamaica and Guyana gain independence from Britain
G. Slavery abolished in the British empire
H. The 200th anniversary of the Parliamentary abolition of the British
Atlantic slave trade
I. Spanish-American War ends with USA stripping Spain of its remaining
Caribbean colonies
J. Columbus’s first voyage to the New World. He establishes the first
European settlement at Hispaniola
K. The 200th anniversary of the independence of Haiti
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Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence
AM217
L. The ‘Banana Wars’ trade dispute between USA and European Union
“Imaginative geographies”
The objective space of a house – its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms – is far
less important than what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a
quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel; thus a
house may be haunted or homelike, or prisonlike or magical. So space
acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process,
whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into
meaning for us here.
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London, 1978;
1995, new edition), p. 55.
Introductory quiz, part 2: Caribbean fantasies
Again in pairs, choose no more than 5 words/phrases that you associate with
the Caribbean:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The Caribbean and the wider world
[N]othing was created in the British West Indies, no civilization as in Spanish
America, no great revolution as in Haiti or the American colonies. There were
only plantations, prosperity, decline, neglect: the size of the islands called for
nothing else…In the West Indian islands slavery and latifundia created only
grossness, men who ate ‘like cormorants’ and drank ‘like porposes’; a society
without standards, without noble aspirations, nourished by greed and
cruelty…How can the history of this West Indian futility be written?…The
history of the islands can never be satisfactorily told. Brutality is not the only
difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was
created in the West Indies.
V. S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (1963), pp 28-29.
Britain was accumulating great wealth from the triangular trade. The increase
in consumption of goods called forth by that trade inevitably drew in its train
the development of the productive power of the country. This industrial
expansion required finance. What man in the first three-quarters of the
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Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence
AM217
eighteenth century was better able to afford the ready capital than a West
Indian sugar planter or a Liverpool slave trader?...[T]he investment of profits
from the triangular trade in British industry…supplied part of the huge outlay
for the construction of the vast plants to meet the needs of the new productive
process and the new markets.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (1944), p. 98.
Although the Caribbean lies at the heart of the western hemisphere and was
historically pivotal in the rise of Europe to world predominance, it has
nevertheless been spatially and temporally eviscerated [i.e. removed violently]
from the imaginary geographies of ‘Western modernity’. The imagined
community of the West has no space for the islands that were its origin, the
horizon of its self-perception, the source of its wealth…As C. L. R. James
once put it, the Caribbean is ‘in but not of the West’…
Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean:
From Arawaks to Zombies (2003), p. 1.
Globalisation and the Caribbean
For Caribbean people all the talk today about the uniqueness of the present
era of globalisation is cause to chuckle. They know their histories, and realise
they have been through many earlier rounds of globalisation…Historically, the
Caribbean is perhaps the most globalised world region. Since the 1500s it
has been controlled by outside powers, based economically on imported
labour, cleared to create monocultural landscapes of sugar cane, bananas or
other crops, and reliant on the import of virtually everything else needed to
sustain local populations.
R. Potter et al., ‘Globalisation and the Caribbean’ (2004), p. 388.
[T]he sea-crossing technologies – canoe, caravel, and container ship – serve
as symbols of the main periods of Caribbean history. The last – the container
ship – defines a short period, the last fifty years. The caravel stands for a
period ten times as long, the 500 years from 1492. The canoe accounts for
another multiple of ten, the previous 5,000 years or more. Each of these
vessels carried with them whole cultures, representing an increasingly global
cargo.
B. W. Higman, A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2011), p. 327.
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