Caribbean Studies: History

Offering a rare pan-Caribbean perspective on a region that has moved from the very center of the western world to its periphery, The Caribbean journeys through five centuries of economic and social development, emphasizing such topics as the slave-run plantation economy, the changes in political control over the centuries, the impact of the United States, and the effects of Castro's Cuban revolution on the area. In addition, this book integrates social analysis with political narrative, providing a unique perspective on the problems of nation-building in an area of dense populations, scarce resources, and an explosive political climate.

This book analyzes West Indian society in detail from the crucial inter-war years from the 1920s to the period of the 1960s and provides an in-depth analysis of the forces that contributed to the shaping of West Indian society. In the preface the author writes; "I have set myself the task in this book of undertaking a descriptive and interpretative analysis of the growth of the modern West Indian society, that is to say of the English-speaking Antilles over the last 40 years of so."

The General History of the Caribbean is part of UNESCO's General and Regional Histories Collection. This publication seeks to contribute to mutual understanding and dialogue between cultures and civilizations. It is broken up into six volumes. v. 1. Autochthonous societies; v. 2. New societies : the Caribbean in the long sixteenth century; v. 3. The slave societies of the Caribbean; v. 4. The long nineteenth century : nineteenth-century transformations; v.5. The Caribbean the twentieth century; v. 6. Methodology and historiography of the Caribbean.

This book presents a general history of the Caribbean islands from the beginning of human settlement about seven thousand years ago to the present. It narrates processes of early human migration, the disastrous consequences of European colonization, the development of slavery and the slave trade, the extraordinary profits earned by the plantation economy, the great revolution in Haiti, movements toward political independence, the Cuban Revolution, and the diaspora of Caribbean people. Written in a lively and accessible style yet current with the most recent research, the book provides a compelling narrative of Caribbean history essential for students and visitors.

This comprehensive volume takes the reader through more than 500 years of Caribbean history, beginning with Columbus's arrival in the Bahamas in 1492. A Brief History of the Caribbean traces the people and events that have marked this constantly shifting region, encompassing everything from economic booms and busts to epidemics, wars, and revolutions, and bringing to life such important figures as Sir Francis Drake, Blackbeard, Toussaint Louverture, Fidel Castro, the Duvaliers, and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. This superbly written history, revised and updated, with new chapters that reflect the islands' most recent social, economic, and political developments, is a work of impeccable scholarship. Featuring maps, charts, tables, and photographs, it remains the ideal guide to the region and its people.

This volume brings together a host of renowned scholars who offer new analyses of the Black Power demonstrations in Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as of the little-studied cases of Guyana, Barbados, Antigua, Bermuda, the Dutch Caribbean, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The essays in this collection highlight the unique origins and causes of Black Power mobilization in the Caribbean, its relationship to Black Power in the United States, and the local and global aspects of the movement, ultimately situating the historical roots and modern legacies of Caribbean Black Power in a wider, international context.

Skillfully weaving an African worldview into the conventional historiography of British abolitionism, Claudius K. Fergus presents new insights into one of the most intriguing and momentous episodes of Atlantic history. In Revolutionary Emancipation, Fergus argues that the 1760 rebellion in Jamaica, Tacky's War--the largest and most destructive rebellion of enslaved peoples in the Americas prior to the Haitian Revolution--provided the rationale for abolition and reform of the colonial system.