The Caribbean region: crucible for modern world history

ALAN L. KARRAS

In fourteen hundred and ninety two, Columbus sailed the Ocean Blue. He had three ships and left from Spain; he sailed through sunshine, wind, and rain.

This familiar childhood poem, of unknown authorship, eventually mentions the Bahamas, the site of the first European landing in the Americas.

Because the Caribbean region was the first area of the Americas that Europeans encountered and therefore the first region of the “New World” to connect with the “Old World,” it ought to be considered a crucible for understanding many of the modern world's historical processes. These processes, at least through the years covered by this volume, include implant­ation and colonization, global migration, enslavement, extraction, economic transformation and integration, as well as (very briefly) revolution and state building. Although the Caribbean region faced these problems first, many world historians overlook it, preferring instead to study more populous areas in Africa and Asia. Within the field of global history, then, there is much more knowledge about connections within the “Old World” than there is familiarity with the same kinds of connections that existed in the “New World.” This is true despite the fact that, though known to Europeans much longer than places in the Americas, Asian and African societies were not fully integrated into the growing European-dominated global economy until relatively late in the eighteenth century, just as relations between the American colonies—including those in the Caribbean—and their various European powers had begun to deteriorate.

Making matters worse, scholars of the mainland Americas, North and South, rarely consider the Caribbean region at all. Such neglect can be easily explained: islands are not continents. Their finite geographies limited their ability to expand their frontiers and, with the exception of the Greater Antilles (Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica), they quickly ran out of land as more and more territory was placed into cultivation. Moreover, the islands' economic contributions to European empires, which were strongly bound to sugar monoculture, deteriorated in the nineteenth century as new luxury products from Asia became more accessible to European con­sumers and the Caribbean islands failed to diversify, instead doubling down on increasing sugar production.

It certainly did not help, either historically or historiographically, that the region never developed a singular national, regional or even linguistic identity. Instead, the Caribbean archipelago remained politically and linguis­tically fragmented, with different European powers involved in each island's government and economy—often creating negative consequences for all of those who lived there, whether black or white. Although there were certain policies and practices, such as sugar price supports within various European empires, which benefited at least the elite in their colonies, in general policies were designed in Europe to benefit those in Europe. As the centuries progressed, the ire of many who resided in the Caribbean grew. This ire was caused not so much by the lack of political representation, as happened elsewhere, but by economic regulations that made no sense for Caribbean consumers. The lack of a single regional identity allowed much of the Caribbean to remain under colonial rule through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it diluted the colonial voice, as local concerns across the region did not frequently get connected and amplified.

Although Columbus's voyages began the process of communication between the New and the Old Worlds, this nascent global integration never resulted in either a clear regional Caribbean identity or a historical view of the region's contributions to rising globalization over the longue duree.

One solution to this neglect might appear to be the new scholarly emphasis on the Atlantic World, which linked the four continents that bordered the ocean: Europe, Africa, and North and South America. The Caribbean straddles North and South America, so is clearly included in the Atlantic World. Taking this approach, however, is now fraught with peril. Scholars of the United States—which has a very clear national narrative— have colonized Atlantic History as a field and are gradually finding ways to insert the creation of the United States into international history. In one sense, this is a positive development as it tackles the persistent problem of American exceptionalism that has in many ways deeply permeated scholarship about the Western Hemisphere. But in other ways it compounds the issues faced by the Caribbean in being admitted to the world history club. By focusing on the mainland North American colonies as part of a larger Atlantic World, some scholars have again relegated the Caribbean colonies to a bit part—this time because they did not join in the American War for Independ­ence, the modern world's first anti-colonial revolt.

The Caribbean colonies were, and ought to remain, central—not just to scholars of the Western Hemisphere in the early modern world, but also to world historians who can see in this region a microcosm of encounters and exchange that would be replicated time and time again over the next several centuries. The Caribbean must surely be considered a crucible in the labora­tory of historical examination.

Colonization and violence

After Columbus's voyages both symbolically and historically opened up the Caribbean area to European exploration and settlement, Spanish settlers crossed the ocean and occupied the Greater Antilles. They established forts, built small-scale cities and developed staging areas that ultimately supported those who went on to colonize mainland Spanish America. These bases came at the expense of the indigenous Amerindian populations, which consisted of several groups: the Arawaks (including the Taino and Lucayans) in the north and west of the region, and the Caribs, in the south and east. In virtually all of the islands, native peoples quickly died off as they encountered the arriving bands of European sailors and soldiers. Either they succumbed to Old World diseases, such as smallpox, which overran their New World immune systems, or they were victims of weapons that were unknown in the isolated world of the Americas before the Iberians' arrival.

In the islands, the indigenous populations generally did not recover, although the Spanish did try to move Amerindians from one island to another, first as slaves and then, when the government and church in Spain frowned upon this practice and encouraged greater indigenous evangeliza­tion, as (poorly) compensated workers. The Spanish further shifted their attentions to the mainland, which had the effect of opening up the rest of the Caribbean region—an area over 2,000 miles across—for other European interlopers to claim territory that was officially Spanish, but did not have sufficient military protection to prevent its capture. It was then up to those from England, France, the Netherlands and even Denmark to figure out what to do with their newly acquired territories. All of them eventually turned to African slavery, which came to characterize the region and is discussed in greater detail below.

Because Spain was always more focused on the larger islands in the western part of the Caribbean (and on conquering the powerful expansionist empires on the mainland), it never spent much time or energy ensuring that the smaller, often volcanic, islands of the eastern Caribbean (the Lesser Antilles) were brought under strict control. Especially after 1550, this allowed predators from elsewhere in Europe to enter the area and find ways to harass Spanish shipping and interrupt the gigantic flow of silver bullion that was

The Caribbean region: crucible for modern world history leaving the Americas in convoy and making its way to Spain. Before 1550, Northern Europeans generally came to the Caribbean with the hope of trading with Spanish residents there. The trade was, of course, contraband as Spain did not allow trade with nationals of other countries, but it was nevertheless profitable, encouraging more entrepreneurs to brave the Atlan­tic crossing with the hopes of striking it rich.

Violence certainly became part of the popular perception of the Caribbean region in many European metropoles. Residents came to see the region as a place in which quick wealth could be accumulated, though also as a place where there was an ever-present risk of a quick death. Northern European rulers tacitly encouraged migration, especially as a way to increase their own treasuries. Moreover, they licensed men like Sir Francis Drake, and their ships, to harass Spanish shipping, and capture wealth that would otherwise find its way into the Spanish treasury. Such captains' initial successes at diverting bullion from Spain encouraged other young men, who were not generally licensed by their states, to set off for the Caribbean in search of their own fortunes. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, these “get rich quick” schemes caused a further change in the Caribbean region's geopolitics. Pirates, for that is what these young men were, became non-state actors whose redistribution of wealth through robbery on the high seas propelled the region into the popular imagination, and caused its reputation as a place where anything could happen and where one's personal safety could not be guaranteed. And this was assuming that pale Europeans were able to survive the hot and humid days for which tropical climates are known.

Pirate raids on the Spanish treasure fleet cost Spain enormously—both in its treasury and in its prestige relative to its Old World rivals. After all, the Spanish state was unable to prevent piracy from getting off the ground, nor was it especially successful at slowing or eradicating its continued growth. (Because the Spanish treasure fleet sailed in convoy at precise moments in the year, and because the ocean currents and winds made only two routes possible, the flota was an easy, yet a moving, target.)

If there is anything that persistently occupies the popular imagination about the Caribbean, it is pirates. Most people know very little about the Caribbean region and its early history, except of course that there were pirates. Whether from the rides in Disney theme parks around the world, or the eponymous movie series, many people strongly associate the region with pirates, who were (allegedly) ready at a moment's notice to plunder passing treasure ships or burn small cities to the ground if the residents failed to hand over their valuables on command. In some ways, this is not an unreasonable picture, as there is some truth in these images. There were quite a number of pirates in the region during this period; many came from across Northern Europe (and, later, North America) hoping to strike it rich and taking advantage of Spain's extremely loose border enforcement. Drawn mostly from the lower social orders across Europe, pirates saw robbery on the high seas as an escape from the grinding poverty that they had experienced for much of their lives. Their lives were not at all easy, but if they survived they at least had the potential to amass fortunes that would otherwise have been beyond their grasp if they had instead remained at home in Europe.

Many people now romanticize the region's pirates as rebels against a system that bred inequality. Because many ships had a pirate code of conduct, voted on some aspects of the way in which their ships would operate, developed schemes for dividing up “booty” and provided compen­sation for permanent injury (such as the loss of a limb), some have suggested that pirates were nascent democrats whose contributions to early modern politics illuminate democratic tendencies in a manifestly undemocratic age. This can be a problematic reading, and one the victims of the pirates would no doubt dispute. Pirates heavily relied on the use (or threat) of force in order to extract riches from those who happened to be in the wrong (or right) place at the wrong (or right) time. Initially welcomed by the surviving Amerindian populations of the smaller islands—because they were not Spanish and indeed had the express purpose of robbing the Spanish— they soon overstayed their welcome. They did so by effectively occupying some of the smaller islands, and creating zones of control. Successful pirates had money to spend, which caused those willing to take their money, usually in exchange for drink, lodging and sex, to migrate to the Caribbean in order to serve this nouveau riche clientele. As a result, some of the smaller Caribbean islands began to be developed, further reducing the Amerindian population and causing more Europeans to migrate, either to turn pirate or to serve those whose adventures resulted in pecuniary gain. To focus on

The Caribbean region: crucible for modern world history romanticized rebellion masks the essentially mercantilist, or at least financial, motives of pirates. They represented the logical outcome of mercantilism run amok.

Through colonialism and violence, what was once a densely populated and geographically isolated region became incorporated into the Afro-Eurasian economy—making it truly global. The price was millions of Amerindian lives. The islands' decentralized political structures, especially in comparison to those on the mainland, were left decentralized, even though most islands were incorporated into the European empires emerging at the time. The source of law was always at some distance from the place that it was to be carried out, making consistent legal enforcement an issue. This diffused power and authority came to characterize the region, as it would later characterize other empires in other places.

Spain consistently maintained that it had a right to control the region, and demanded that other European states, such as the English, French and Dutch, police those of their subjects who had become pirates in the Carib­bean. Such demands did not go down especially well in London, Paris and Amsterdam. Although the Spanish and Portuguese had divided any newly discovered territories in the Americas between them in the Treaty of Torde- sillas (1494), other European powers generally ignored this treaty. This left it to the Iberians to police their own territories and the terms of the treaty itself. This was not an easy task: the Americas were vast, but the small size of the Caribbean islands (along with the large sea that created their borders) made them hard to monitor, especially given that those who most needed prolonged police observation generally had no fixed address. To make matters worse, those charged with enforcing the legal regime frequently had inadequate resources to accomplish their tasks. The Europeans had inadequate resources to run and consistently monitor their empires.

The European occupation, and later settlement, of the Caribbean islands illustrates the ways in which Europeans gained control over areas of the world that they sought to dominate. In the case of the Caribbean, the job became easier than it ought to have been—and that it would prove to be in other areas of the world—because of the region's massive population loss. Nevertheless, the colonization process across the Caribbean foretold what would happen elsewhere around the globe several centuries later. At first, a few Europeans showed up, wanting to trade with the local populations— either for luxury products or for bullion that they could use to purchase luxury products somewhere else. Limited trade generally followed, and the Europeans eventually ended up controlling the commercial and exchange

processes. For a variety of reasons, Asian and African populations did not anticipate the degree to which many European traders would relentlessly pursue their own mercantilist agendas. This frequently caused Europeans to change tactics and terms and frustrated their trading partners, politically weakening some of them along the way. The African slave trade is one such example; the opium trade between India and China yet another. From the Caribbean to Canton, Europeans succeeded in dominating the economic systems that they encountered. This process happened first in the Americas, and especially in the Caribbean, simply because Europeans went to the Americas and were able to take over the hemisphere relatively quickly.

Another, and perhaps more useful, way to think about this would be to consider these early points of contact between colonizer and colonized as part of an implantation process that accompanies all colonial activity. Examining the Caribbean region when it first became known to Europeans and was integrated into the pre-existing “Old World” networks of exchange generates a kind of rough model to understand global interactions in subse­quent centuries. During this process, colonizers—European and otherwise— implant themselves along with their ideas, values and cultural practices, into the place and society that will be colonized. Typically, the colonial power develops points of entry that result in their being able to take over places and spaces, running them to the colonial power's advantage. In the Caribbean region, this process took some time, despite being aided by the rapid depopulation that took place when the Old and New World peoples encoun­tered each other. There are several main explanations for the slow speed at which implantation happened: (ι) the Caribbean region is geographically spread out; (2) there were actually very few Europeans who were involved in conquest; (3) the political systems of the indigenous people were relatively diffuse; (4) there were several European state actors, in many ways working against each other; (5) indigenous depopulation made it more difficult to have a reliable and docile labor force; and (6) the European colonizers did not have a clear idea of what they wanted to achieve, because they were never really intending to “discover” a new continent. Mercantilist competi­tion among European states no doubt fueled the desire to find new routes to Asia, and to colonize the Caribbean as a substitute; at the same time, islands that had been brought under European authority needed something that would simultaneously attract new settlers and generate some sort of economic reward for their efforts. The islands were not teeming with spices, or luxuries, or even bullion; thus, Europeans in the Caribbean sought an alternative source of treasure to make the journeys worth their while. To put it another way, they needed to put something in their crucible that would sell in a global—and mercantile—world, while using the region's compara­tive advantages.

That something would be sugar, a luxury product in sixteenth-century Europe, both rare and expensive. The introduction of sugar took time, however. Although it had been introduced to Hispaniola as early as the late 1520s, sugar mills there remained rather small. It took several generations before the crop went into widespread production around the Caribbean, resulting in it becoming more easily available. By the middle of the seven­teenth century, many of the Caribbean islands produced vast quantities of sugar—production that would only continue to grow. The English, French and Dutch (along with the Danes) found ways to trade sugar produced with coerced African labor for Spanish bullion. This effort at trade eventually and generally made piracy unnecessary, and reshaped the whole of the region's economy, environment and population. As mainland America had done with mining of precious gold and silver (and as other colonial societies and polities did later), the Caribbean made a dramatic turn, and moved towards resource extraction. That process of resource extraction defined the Caribbean for centuries to come.

Sugar and slavery

Just as pirates dominate modern popular consciousness about the Caribbean region, the association between sugar and slavery dominates the work of historians. They have largely focused their energies on this association. Indeed, it is hard to find much Caribbean history that does not deal with either sugar or slavery—even in history that focuses on the era after slavery was abolished in the nineteenth century. More often, historical scholarship has mined the many connections between sugar monoculture and the slaves who worked in this industry, or who supported it with their labors elsewhere on the plantations.

Scholarship on the Caribbean region has tried to achieve what might be called a holistic study of sugar and slavery across the region, but there are still linguistic barriers that make this difficult. Although sugar itself regularly crossed borders, historians of one linguistic zone rarely consider what happened in another linguistic zone. This is not surprising, given the language skills required to work in the many languages in which documents appear in Caribbean archives. Geographical divisions are ever-present in this literature: few studies look at more than a few (if that) countries, and fewer

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16.1 The Caribbean in 1800

still have worked on comparing what happened in, for instance, the Leeward islands with what happened in Cuba, or Suriname. Research fields are largely defined by European language groups, and follow European colonial patterns. This is not necessarily bad, but it does suggest an area for future exploration. Slavery was not established in all of these places at the same time, nor did it end in all of these places at the same time. But it was practiced simultaneously in many countries across the region, and sugar was the dominant crop in virtually all of the larger colonies.

Despite this common pattern, people other than historians generally have only a vague sense of just how tightly sugar and slavery were connected in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This is problematic for several reasons. First, it ignores a major shift in consumption. The history of a crop whose consumption grew from 4 lbs. per capita per year in 1700 to 13 lbs. per capita per year in 1800 has to be by definition significant. (It has also been estimated that by 1933 per capita consumption of sugar in the United Kingdom and United States reached nearly 100 lbs. per person and has remained close to that level ever since; these high rates of consumption were made possible by the development of more efficient ways of extracting sugar, combined with industrial food processing in which sugar and sugar products such as corn syrup were used in many, many products.^[314]) Second, it separates production from consumption, a pattern that continues today. Most people in the developed world rarely—if ever—think about the origins of products they consume, whether foodstuffs, clothing or something else altogether. A factory collapse in Bangladesh may raise awareness of such connections, but after a few days of righteous indignation, consumers go back to consuming, not thinking about those who produce what they consume. So it was earlier—European consumers were rarely reminded that Africans, who had been forced to migrate across the Atlantic and faced very poor prospects when it came to life expectancy, produced the addictive sugar that they craved. The ocean allowed European consumers to be intellectually divorced from the global economy, or to participate in it only in a sanitized way. This extended the lifespan of the sugar economy, while shortening those of its laborers. The removal of slaves from European sight also extended slavery, which continued even after it may not have been the most economical system that could have been used to produce sugar. By then, of course, slavery had become an ingrained cultural practice—some­thing important to the maintenance of social order.

Moreover, the Africans who had been imported specifically to labor on producing this crop not only sacrificed their lives, as death rates remained lamentably high almost everywhere through the eighteenth century, but also greatly contributed to the New World's profits. This was often at the African continent's expense. Although eventually the African population recovered, it is hard to see how exporting 12 million people could not have had an impact on the productivity of those African societies that sent slaves. The mortality rate of Caribbean slaves improved in most places in the early nineteenth century, but for much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centur­ies, it proved to be cheaper to buy a new slave, mistreat him or her, and then buy another, than to buy a slave and make sure that he or she was well cared for and could live to reproduce. The wanton disregard of human feeling (fellow-feeling, as Adam Smith would later say) resulted in asymmetrical social orders that would appear elsewhere in the colonial worlds of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[315]

The growing production of sugar, coupled with the dramatically rising slave importation into virtually all of the Caribbean colonies, best charac­terizes the mature colonial Caribbean world. At the same time, connections between the Caribbean colonies and the European metropoles strengthened, as transoceanic communication became more regular and as sugar fostered economic growth and increased profits, at least for slave-owners. The earliest sugar planters made vast sums of money and retired to extremely large houses in their native European countries. Few wanted to stay in the islands, finding slavery distasteful and the climate unpleasant. Other young men followed them, hoping to replicate their successes and themselves become absentee estate owners—or at least move up in the world. But opportunities to do so diminished, as the geographical boundaries of island societies limited the amount of land that could be placed into cultivation and sugar prices declined as production increased. Many island economies also developed small middle or managerial classes, which consisted of profes- sionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, managers—and skilled craftsmen— carpenters and coopers—who came to the region to make their fortunes while practicing trades.^[316] Although all were upwardly mobile, few achieved their goals of earning quick fortunes, and, like pirates, they were enmeshed in a system of violence-driven mercantalism. Even so, their presence created at least the semblance of a European rank-ordered society that would have been somewhat familiar to them, despite their location in exotic locations surrounded, and outnumbered, by African slaves.

Many, if not most, Caribbean societies did not open schools until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries, requiring parents who wanted their sons (and, occasionally, their daughters) to be educated to send them back to Europe. This provided a constant stream of migration back and forth across the Atlantic between Europe and the Caribbean. The colonies were seen as transitory opportunities for advancement, much as Europeans in those nineteenth-century states with empires envisioned prospects for themselves around the globe as temporary, almost a rite of passage. Indeed, in the British colonies at least, many of the same families that migrated to and from the Caribbean later had relatives migrating to and from India, as well as other places in the imperial world. The movement of people to fill “white” jobs, combined with the movement of African (and creole) slaves, provided the framework for a kind of European-centered social hierarchy, one that would be used elsewhere in the world, though with indigenous workers filling many jobs. After slavery had been universally abolished, Asian contract workers were shipped around the globe to perform work that was deemed to be beneath European workers. (The Caribbean received its share of Chinese and Indian “coolies,” but they did not arrive until the mid-nineteenth century.)

The creation of new social hierarchies that took place in the Caribbean presaged developments in later colonies around the world, and was inevit­ably entwined with racial stratification. This stratification resulted not from any kind of indigenous hierarchy, as the indigenes had been eliminated, but rather from the Caribbean's demographic imbalance, combined with the huge power imbalances in Caribbean plantation societies. More African men than African women went to most areas of the Caribbean, which meant that African women had a difficult time starting (or raising) families with male slaves. If they labored on the plantations, their fecundity and life expectancy were low. The preponderance of European migrants consisted of young men, and in general blacks outnumbered whites by as much as 10:1.^[317] With relatively few white women from which to choose a sexual partner, many men took slave mistresses, either with or without their consent, often from among the African women who worked in their households.

There were restrictions against this mixing or that limited the social position of the mixed race progeny in a number of Caribbean islands, which suggests that laws were created ex post facto in an attempt to prevent something that was already widely happening. Despite legal limitations on their social mobility, the resulting progeny held elevated status when compared with those of purely African descent, and could take on menial, frequently non-agricultural jobs or, in the eighteenth century, certain artisa­nal or craft-worker jobs. The limits of the positions that those of mixed race could achieve were generally precisely defined in law, but this was not always enforceable. In most Caribbean societies, there was a clear hierarchy of color. At least in general, the lighter one's skin, the higher one's social status; the opposite was also true, for dark skin generally brought low status. Being born in the colony, a creole, generally meant higher status than being a slave newly arrived from Africa. Skin color did not always match parentage, however, so what was supposed to be a strict hierarchy was often much more fluid and malleable, especially when compared to places in North America.

There has been insufficient attention paid to the ways in which interracial sex provided an essential buffer for many of Caribbean slavery's harshest conditions. By creating a group of people that stood between Africans and Europeans, interracial sexual liaisons also generated a way for the wealthiest whites to maintain order.

Slavery is one half of the combination that so dominated Caribbean history in the seventeenth and, especially, the eighteenth centuries. Sugar, of course, is the other half; it was the crop that required large quantities of labor to produce and it was the crop that powered the Caribbean economy to profitability. Extracting this resource allowed Northern Europeans to compete with the Spanish, who were extracting precious metal with cheap Amerindian labor. The Northern Europeans won, especially because sugar was so cheaply produced and because it was addictive, which helped to increase demand. Even the Spanish were willing to part with their bullion in exchange for sugar (along with tobacco, another addictive New World product).

It would be impossible to consider the Caribbean as a crucible for world history without some discussion of the general principles of resource extraction, which came to characterize colonial economies throughout the modern world. The standard description of this in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries suggests that colonies extracted the raw materials for industrializing (and industrial) European societies, which then turned around and provided cheaply produced industrial products, such as cotton textiles, to their colonies. Such cheaply made goods increased consumption in the colonies, but also changed the nature of local economies, as indigenous artisans—say, weavers in India—confronted diminished demand for their wares. As a flood of mass-produced goods arrived in Africa and Asia, the colonies became more dependent on the metropoles for life's basic neces­sities. In this particular example, cotton producers thus became cotton consumers. Societal independence vanished as empires took root.

While this argument makes sense in imperialism's nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts, it is difficult to make a direct analogy with the pre-industrial Caribbean. Indeed, it is possible to make the opposite case. Few in the colonies could afford European-produced luxury products; they remained an aspiration for most whites, and for slaves they were out of the question. Some whites would go into debt to acquire them, mortgaging their plantations and future crops in order to buy goods on credit. Caribbean slaves, through their labor in a monoculture economy, generated profits for their owners, which were expressed in merchant house account books. In turn, these credits allowed European residents (and absentee owners) to consume simply by borrowing against their credit.

Moreover, the price of sugar, which was often protected, generated enough profit from European consumers for the merchants either to spend their money consuming luxury goods (which transferred wealth to other merchants) or to invest in Europe's nascent industrial economy, whether directly or indirectly. In this way, Caribbean slavery, with its cheap labor, fueled European economic development by allowing extra European capital that could have been used for wage labor in the Caribbean to enter other areas of the economy, including, indirectly, European factories, which would later mass-produce goods for both European and colonial markets. In this particular example, Caribbean producers enabled European consumers to increase their consumption, growing the economy and transforming it. Although sugar was the main resource being produced with slave labor in the Caribbean islands, coffee, cocoa, cattle and timber—as well as a smatter­ing of other products, such as cotton, tobacco and indigo—were also being produced.^[318] In no case did Europeans or those of mixed race do much more than supervise the agricultural labor performed by the slaves. Food was generally imported in these economies, although a number of Caribbean islands found that allowing slaves time to produce their own food diminished the likelihood of revolt and increased the likelihood that slaves would live more than a few years. Although these actions certainly helped improve local conditions for the slaves, they did not challenge the slave system in any meaningful way, allowing it to continue through the mature phase of Caribbean colonialism. But these actions did provide a useful model for subsequent colonists in other places around the world who needed a rela­tively docile labor force to extract what European colonists came to demand.

Sugar production with slave labor provides the main way that most scholars understand the Caribbean's mature colonialism. It is an accurate depiction of virtually all of the colonies, regardless of which European power controlled the island. Colonies that did not grow much sugar were certainly involved in exporting it to Europe; places like Dutch St. Eustatius were little more than transshipment ports. Caribbean sugar was not consumed by its producers; rather, it was shipped across the Atlantic Ocean and purchased by Europeans, who increased the demand for the crop, causing the number of slaves in the Caribbean islands to rise in order to increase production to meet demand. This cycle continued into the nineteenth century.

Rising consumption on one side of the Atlantic required more than just increased production on the other. It also required a regular distribution network, which of course the Caribbean had. Throughout the period of mature colonialism, trading practices were at once extremely restrictive and clearly defined in law. All of the European powers, with the exception of the Dutch, limited trade and proscribed certain activities. In general, trade between Europe and the Americas had to be carried out in ships that belonged to the mother country and that were manned with crews consisting of a certain percentage of that country's nationals. In Spain and France, for example, only certain ports had been authorized to receive the colonial trade. Prohibitive tariffs were introduced in order to dissuade foreign produce and manufactures from entering either the colonies or the metropoles. And in many places, price supports guaranteed European merchants a minimum return on their investments. Caribbean sugar magnates had precious little choice about where to sell their sugar legally.

Although these restrictions were widespread throughout the Atlantic World, they were also regularly ignored or challenged. European colonists in the Americas realized that the commercial policies under which they lived had been designed to benefit European traders, by creating for them (or actually a subgroup of them) a monopoly on trade with their country's colonies. The resulting policies were not well regarded by those actually living in the Caribbean. Island residents rightly argued that the trading restrictions took money out of their pockets, requiring them to buy both provisions and consumer goods from the mother country that were either more expensive than or inferior to things they could get closer to home. Moreover, they had to wait until ships from the mother country arrived to buy anything, despite having unmet needs and shortages on a regular basis. (On occasion, and especially during wartime, some colonies opened their ports to anyone, in order to get enough provisions to feed the slaves.) Although commercial policy ensured a regular system of trade across the Atlantic, the very same merchant houses that argued to keep commercial restrictions in place also regularly and repeatedly violated them.

Smuggling therefore became endemic to the region. And everything was smuggled, from slaves who had been brought from a neighboring island, to sugar from one country's colony to be exported as sugar from the colony into which it was smuggled, to fancy clothing that would otherwise not have been available, to food from North America. All of this was done in plain view of imperial authorities, from customs collectors to governors, from sailors to admirals. Local government officials knew that challenging smuggling activities risked upsetting the populations who were smuggling, which had a potential negative side effect. Those populations had the ability to make the colony ungovernable, by raising complaints to those in Europe actually tasked with running the empire. They could also resort to bad local behavior, by throwing up challenges to whatever policies the governor intended to implement. There were no shortage of conflicts between local governors and the planter elite over how vigorously to enforce commercial restrictions or when to open the ports to foreign trade because a food shortage was developing. Local planters could also cause the governor to be recalled to Europe, and be forced to explain himself, which had the discrete advantage of removing a potential rule enforcer from the island and not enforcing unpopular laws and policies. What becomes clear from all of this is that trading policy was created for the convenience of the metropole, and not for those who were actual producers. This sadly also proved to be the case in Europe's subsequent colonies, again suggesting that examining the Caribbean, and considering it as a crucible, will provide valuable insight for world historians looking at later European expansion into Africa and Asia. Or to put it another way, rather than starting their examinations of imperialism with what happened after industrialization or the American Revolution, it behooves scholars to consider looking to the Caribbean—looking backwards to find a large number of historical antecedents.

Although commerce between the Caribbean and Europe largely helps to define the mature colonial period, it does not tell the whole of the story. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans fought many wars with each other. Those wars were also fought in the Caribbean, as the colonies were dragged into the parent countries' conflicts. As a result, colonies could sometimes change from being Spanish to British or from French to British (and vice versa). While this created problems for some colonists, in general, such transitions happened relatively gracefully. But ways around new commercial regulations were almost always con­tinued, even if it meant slightly adapting them to the behavior of the new country's legal regime and its enforcers. The colonists looked after them­selves and their slaves—by consistently trying to get waivers of policy that would allow food importation from neighboring islands and from North America. The ways in which colonies changed hands and became involved in European wars also suggests that the Caribbean region offers fertile com- parisons—historical antecedents—to those who are interested in more recent empires, where world wars involved conscripting subjugated populations.

Rebellion and decolonization

The Caribbean region generally disappears from world history after the plantation economy reaches full speed and the last pirates are eradicated, sometime in the first half of the eighteenth century. In a way, this makes perfect sense, as global forces had begun to move on. The Caribbean does appear again at two other moments, which happen to be related—although a century and a half chronologically separates them. The first is the creation of the state of Haiti. This began as a slave rebellion in 1792, and was deeply influenced by both the American and French Revolutions. It was, in fact, a protracted series of battles, with the stated political positions of the sides changing on a very regular basis. The French revolutionaries who wound up controlling the colonies did not quite know what to do about granting equality to anyone in their very profitable sugar colony, Saint Domingue, despite demand from the gens de couleur for equality and furious resistance to this from the island's white population.

At some moments, the French were prepared to grant independence, and at other moments, they contemplated re-conquering the island and re­imposing slavery. The Haitian Revolution (as it is popularly called, although Haiti did not exist at the start of the war) went on for several phases and for over a decade, but it is nevertheless significant for being the most successful slave revolt in modern world history. It demonstrates to historians, as it did to slave-holders, just how violent slave populations could be when pushed to the brink. Since it resulted in France being forced to give up its colony, it is also properly classified as decolonization, which generally happened much later for the rest of the Caribbean. What happened in Haiti set a pattern for later developments. The way in which the other European colonial powers rallied around France when it was kicked out of the colony, even trying to help it retake Haiti, provides an early example of the ways in which colonial powers would coordinate to try to figure out how best to decolonize, or avoid decolonizing, their colonies. France was also indemni­fied for its loss, setting a pattern for later examples of other colonial powers being compensated when they lost their colonies.

The second moment when the Caribbean region sometimes enters into general world historical discussion is decolonization. This movement gener­ally took place around the Caribbean in the twentieth century, after World War II. Many scholars consider the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro to be the most significant event to take place within this historical process. Like Haiti, the Cuban Revolution was a violent mutiny against those in power. Unlike Haiti, however, the colonial power, Spain, had given up on Cuba decades before, after some violent uprisings and belated efforts to have it successfully join the plantation complex. This allowed the United States to fill the gap, becoming an unofficial (some might say neo-) colonial power. Because the Cuban Revolution took place at the height of the Cold War, it is not at all surprising that the period's competing ideologies of capitalism and Communism came to center stage in the debate over what Castro's Cuba ought to look like. Cuba then became a case study for the Cold War in the Americas and the proxy battles that took place with some frequency between Moscow and Washington.

Apart from these two moments, the Caribbean's general position in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remains somewhat peripheral to the field of world history; it had already gone through what the rest of the world was dealing with as it integrated into or resisted the European global order. This is extremely unfortunate, as societies in Africa and Asia, to say nothing of New Zealand and Oceania, might have been able to glean something of some value from studying the history of global connections that emanated from the Caribbean several generations earlier. Despite this lack of attention, Caribbean societies were hardly stagnant, as there were continued ways to resist the increasing poverty of the (now-emancipated) population as Afro-Caribbeans worked to find new economic approaches that the largely white plantocracy could not accept. Moreover, as empires expanded globally, those whites who held political office generally sought to bring in new ethnic groups, especially Indians and Chinese, to serve as buffers between free black populations and the planters. All of this begs the question of why the Caribbean colonies did not find a way out of colonization.

There were generally two things that prevented the eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies from declaring their independence and opting to go it alone. First, the colonies generated enough profit, or at least enough credit, for enough (white) people that ending the colonial system's restricted, but protected, trade never became a high priority. It is quite possible that full national independence could have produced better results, but the risk was not something that those in power in the Caribbean could easily tolerate. So they stuck with what they—and their ancestors—knew. Second and more important was the problem of slavery. The United States had a much smaller slave population, as a proportion of total population, at its independ­ence than did the Caribbean during the same period. The latter region's white minority could not envision a world without slavery or a world with slavery, for that matter, without a large army provided by the colonial state to prevent and extinguish uprisings. It is possible that the colonists could have raised their own militaries, or otherwise paid for protection, but given the frequent complaints of Caribbean governors that the planters did not like to pay for their island's defenses, this would not have been easy. So, instead, the plantocracy doubled down on slavery—seeking to find ways to remain profitable within a slave system that coincidentally allowed them to remain in power.

The subject of decolonization is more properly the subject of another essay; suffice it to say here that the established planter classes at the turn of the nineteenth century did not generally choose to make demands of their European governments. The slaves found other ways to gain control over their lives and, eventually, after they had been emancipated by the

The Caribbean region: crucible for modern world history mid-century, cobbled together livelihoods as free men and women. Perhaps such small improvements were all that the residents of small societies could have expected, given that they were now on the periphery of the European empire, yet they had once been at the core of it. There is surely a model in here for world historians. Gazing into the crucible of Caribbean history could easily reveal it to them.

FURTHER READING

Beckles, Hilary and Verene Shepherd (eds.), Caribbean Slave Society: A Student Reader (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1991).

Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery, From the Baroque to the Modern: 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997).

The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1988).

Cateau, Heather and Rita Pemberton (eds.), Beyond Tradition: Reinterpreting the Caribbean Historical Experience (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006).

Columbus, Christopher, The Four Voyages, J. M. Cohen (trans.) (New York: Penguin Classics, 1992).

Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).

Curtin, Philip, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).

The Rise and Fall of the Plantatian Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Deerr, Noel, The History of Sugar (London: Chapman & Hall, 1949-50).

Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004).

Dunn, Richard S., Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1972).

Emmer, P. C., The Dutch in the Atlantic Economy, 1580-1880: Trade, Slavery and Emancipation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).

Exquemelin, A. O., The Buccaneers of America (New York: DigiReads, 2010).

Higman, B. W., A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Karras, Alan L., Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

Sojourners in the Sun: Scots Migration to Jamaica and the Chesapeake, 1740-1820 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).

Knight, Franklin, The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 1978).

McNeill, J. R., Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Palmie, Stephan and Francisco Scarano (eds.), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Rediker, Marcus, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

Richardson, Bonham, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Shepherd, Verene, Slavery without Sugar: Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society since the Seventeenth Century (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2002).

Shepherd, Verene, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey (eds.), Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (London: Palgrave McMillan, 1995).

Sheridan, Richard, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

Stinchcombe, Arthur, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton University Press, 1995).

Tarrade, Jean, Le Commerce Colonial de la France a la fin de l'Ancien Regime (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972).

UNESCO, General History of the Caribbean, 6 vols. (London: UNESCO, 1997-2011).

Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

From Columbus to Castro: A History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969 (New York: Vintage, 1984).