Abstract
THE slave trade and the sugar revolutions produced profound transformations in the societies, economies and cultures of the Caribbean. The indigenous local societies and polities were rapidly overwhelmed by strange immigrants, at first from Europe and Africa, with later supplements from Asia. The indigenous economies of virtually self-sufficient exchange gave way to a complex, integrated, export-oriented trading system linking the region with the entire circum-Atlantic littoral as well as across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. And the local cultures were savagely destroyed or radically transformed. The relentless intrusion of diverse foreigners into the Caribbean region resulted in fundamental changes both among the indigenous inhabitants as well as among the arriving immigrants. Both groups not only had to make pragmatic adjustments to the other, but they also had to make adjustments to the altered habitat. Within a century after conquest the development of the Caribbean slave systems with their concomitant plantation structures resulted in plural societies and economies as well as a novel, dynamic, hybrid culture of indigenous American, African, European and Asian elements.
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Notes
For the complex development of the Creole tradition of Louisiana, see Virginia R. DomÃnguez, White by Definition. Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986), pp. 12–16
Norman B. Schwartz, Forest Society: A Social History of Peten, Guatemala (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
See Edmund T. Gordon, ‘History, Identity, Consciousness and Revolution: Afro-Nicaraguans and the Nicaraguan Revolution’, in CIDCA/Development Study Unit (ed.), Ethnic Groups and the Nation State, The Case of the Atlantic Coast in Nicaragua (Stockholm: University of Stockholm, 1987), pp. 135–68.
See Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. xiv–xv.
See for example, Ivan van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America (New York: Random House, 1976).
See Cristobal Colon, Los cuatro viajes. Testamento edited by Consuelo Varela (Madrid: Alianza editorial, 1986), pp. 11–12.
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Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God. Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 9.
See Chapter 2. Figures for the respective component units of the Caribbean may be found in Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean. The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 366–7.
Lady Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal, edited by Philip Wright (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica, 1966), p. 132.
See H. Hoetink, Slavery and Race Relations in the Americas. Comparative Notes on their Nature and Nexus (New York, Harper&Row, 1973).
Quoted in Magnus Mörner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 55–6.
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Douglas V. Armstrong, Old Village and the Great House: An Archeological and Historical Examination of Drax Hall Plantation, St Ann’s Bay, Jamaica (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).
See Moreno Fraginals, Africa in Latin America; John Nunley and Judith Bettelheim (eds), Caribbean Festival Arts (St Louis: University of Washington Press, 1988).
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Knight, F.W. (2003). Pluralism, creolization and culture. In: Knight, F.W. (eds) General History of the Caribbean. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73770-3_9
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