The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples

I think The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples will be the last of the general histories of the Caribbean I shall read for the foreseeable future. This has nothing to do with the quality of the text, but after a while, one must find more specific histories to engage with to learn all the nuances and particularities of individual islands or states. Anyway, what I loved about this course is how similar the text's chronology and inclusiveness was to Francisco Scarano's undergraduate Caribbean history course I took some years back. Scarano really emphasized the indigenous Caribbean, the Haitian Revolution, slavery, and Puerto Rico, but due to the limitations of a single semester undergraduate course, did not cover nearly as much as he would have liked.

From talking to others after the publication of this voluminous history of the Caribbean (which he edited, along with Stephan Palmié), that very course I once took now uses this book and is certainly more extensive and inclusive of other aspects of Caribbean history. For instance, the complexities of Caribbean ecology, environmental constraints, 'creolization' in the indigenous Caribbean, as well as inclusion of mainland regions like Suriname and Belize into the Caribbean world paints, with broad strokes, accessible and accurate introductory essays to the history of the Caribbean.

What I would have liked more is substantial citations for each individual essay, particularly because some essay authors included only a handful of references. The book includes a bibliography showing sources for each part of the book (the text is divided into separate parts moving chronologically and thematically) at the end, which is useful, too. Also appreciative is the broader 'Old World' precedents in sugar production that are excellent for framing the broader Atlantic World context of sugarcane. Nonetheless, this is an excellent overview of the Caribbean, from the Taino to the era of globalization that hits on all the themes touched upon by Garrie Gibson and Gad Heuman in their histories of the Caribbean (slavery, race, Cuban Revolution, Haitian Revolution, gender, imperialism/colonialism, creolization, culture, emancipation).