{"id":742,"date":"2014-07-30T13:12:19","date_gmt":"2014-07-30T12:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/?p=742"},"modified":"2014-07-30T13:12:19","modified_gmt":"2014-07-30T12:12:19","slug":"empires-crossroads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/2014\/07\/30\/empires-crossroads\/","title":{"rendered":"Empire's Crossroads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Gibson\"<\/a>The Caribbean is, and has been, a crossroads in human history. It has been a site of convergence – where people have met, fought, exploited one another, and created new cultures. The incorporation of Caribbean\u00a0colonies into Western European economies created another sort of crossroads in world history, helping to prompt a ‘great divergence’<\/a>\u00a0in which nations with access to New World colonies and their slave-produced exports were put on a faster path to economic growth than other regions of the globe.
\nCarrie Gibson’s new book takes a sweeping view of this complicated\u00a0Caribbean intersection, beginning with its so-called ‘discovery’ by Christopher Columbus in 1492 and taking us up to the present day. It is a bold narrative history of a part of the world that, in many ways, defies synthesis. Precisely because the Caribbean was at a\u00a0crossroads between\u00a0various European empires (not to mention the involvement of the USA and, more recently, China) its history criss-crosses with those of Britain, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and others.\u00a0Caribbean people speak English, French, Spanish, Dutch and many varieties of Caribbean Creole. Simply\u00a0defining the region is difficult: are we talking about the whole of the Caribbean littoral,\u00a0only the islands, or just those parts most affected by the defining experiences of slavery and plantation agriculture?
\nGibson takes us on a very readable\u00a0journey\u00a0through Caribbean history, although it is in some ways surprising that we begin in Western Europe and with Columbus. This is a traditional\u00a0sort of opening for a\u00a0book that might well have started in the\u00a0Caribbean before the arrival of Europeans, or with West Africans – millions of whom were trafficked as slaves to turn the Caribbean into\u00a0a huge source of wealth and power, not only for individual colonial planters and transatlantic merchants, but for whole European nations.\u00a0The book\u00a0goes on to\u00a0tell the\u00a0story of the rise and fall of West Indian sugar plantations, slavery and emancipation, nation-building, pan-Africanism, the devastating impact of a Cold War that was not so cold in the Caribbean, different types of migration, and the rise of mass tourism.
\nThis account brings life to its subjects through\u00a0bold writing and makes use of illuminating\u00a0quotes and examples.\u00a0The chapters are divided into subsections that tend to deal with particular regions and events – for instance the chapter on the ending of slavery has sections on the decline of Spain, independent Haiti, slave resistance in the British Caribbean, and American filibustering expeditions.\u00a0This approach helps bring\u00a0together the fragmented stories of several different\u00a0Caribbeans, principally the Hispanic, Francophone and Anglophone, although in places more might have been done to segue between the sections. Gibson’s\u00a0privileging of narration over explanation left me wishing for a bit more discussion to\u00a0tease out the wider implications of events and connections between them.
\nThe main strength of Empire’s Crossroads<\/em>\u00a0is in its wide vision of Caribbean history. Places like Jamaica, Martinique and the Dominican Republic are dealt with side by side. The Cuban Revolution is presented as a pan-Caribbean event. We also learn about the Caribbean in regional context\u00a0– about revolutionary relations\u00a0between Haiti and Venezuela, Martiniquans on the Panama Canal, Jamaicans labouring on Costa Rican banana plantations, as well as the wider Caribbean diasporas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This type of transnational approach is the mark of an exciting young author whose PhD<\/a> was about the Haitian Revolution in the Hispanic Caribbean. It certainly helps make this into an original introduction to one of the world’s most complex and fascinating regions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Caribbean is, and has been, a crossroads in human history. It has been a site of convergence – where people have met, fought, exploited one another, and created new cultures. The incorporation of Caribbean\u00a0colonies into Western European economies created … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":868,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[57,65,71],"class_list":["post-742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-posts","tag-caribbean","tag-empire","tag-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/868"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/742\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/slaveryandrevolution\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}