Caribbean History From
Colonialism to Independence
AM217
David Lambert
Lecture: The Caribbean historical overview
Tuesday 6th October,
11am-12pm
The Caribbean - historical overview
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Introductory quiz, part 1: Histories
Caribbean histories
‘Imaginative geographies’
Introductory quiz, part 2: Fantasies
The Caribbean in the wider world
Major phases in Caribbean history
1. Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries: period of
‘discovery’ and dispossession of indigenous
population.
Map 1 (1492-1504)
Major phases in Caribbean history
1. Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries: period of
‘discovery’ and dispossession of indigenous
population.
2. Eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries: growth
of plantation slavery and intra-imperial conflict.
Map 2 (1804)
Major phases in Caribbean history
1. Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries: period of
‘discovery’ and dispossession of indigenous
population.
2. Eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries: growth
of plantation slavery and intra-imperial conflict.
3. Mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries: ‘free
labour’ plantation commodity and increasing
USA involvement.
Map 3 (1900)
Major phases in Caribbean history
1. Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries: period of
‘discovery’ and dispossession of indigenous
population.
2. Eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries: growth
of plantation slavery and intra-imperial conflict.
3. Mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries: ‘free
labour’ plantation commodity and increasing
USA involvement.
4. Late twentieth century to today: decolonisation
and explosion of tourism.
Map 4 (2015)
Major phases in Caribbean history
1. Sixteenth to seventeenth centuries: period of
‘discovery’ and dispossession of indigenous
population.
2. Eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries: growth
of plantation slavery and intra-imperial conflict.
3. Mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries: ‘free
labour’ plantation commodity and increasing
USA involvement.
4. Late twentieth century to today: decolonisation
and explosion of tourism.
The plantation as the defining
feature of the Caribbean?
I think that the arrival and proliferation of the
plantations is the most important historical
phenomenon to have come about in the
Caribbean, to the extent that if it had not occurred
the islands of the region might today perhaps be
miniature replicas – at least in demographic and
ethnological terms – of the European nations that
colonized them.
Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island
(1992), pp 38-39.
The plantation as the defining
feature of the Caribbean?
“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.
The Caribbean in the
Atlantic world, c. 1800
V. S. Naipaul, The middle passage
(1963), pp 28-29.
[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.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and
slavery (1944), p. 98.
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
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.
The Caribbean:
‘in but not of the West’
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’…
M. Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From
Arawaks to zombies (2003), p. 1.
The Caribbean in the
Atlantic world, c. 1800
The Caribbean in the
Atlantic world, c. 1800
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.
Globalisation and the Caribbean
[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.
Key themes
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Long-term historical phases
The rise (and fall) of the plantation
Fantasies: erasures and effects
The Caribbean as a global, globalised
and globalising region
Seminar: Studying the
Caribbean
Tuesday 6th October,
3pm and 4pm, H3.02