Economic interpretations of Caribbean history

Abstract

The Caribbean, as a conceptual invention of modern historical discourse, has been subject to ongoing analysis in which metatheoretical frameworks and paradigms have played an important part. Participants in the dialogues of its ‘discovery’, ‘ownership’ and ‘identity’, for example, from the early sixteenth century to the present, have tended to indicate the centrality of materialist onsiderations to any understanding of what essentially the ‘territory’ represents. Discussions, furthermore, have drawn upon theories and models that have generally emerged from the contexts of wider discussions in which the colonized world is (re)presented as an expression and a facilitator of larger socioeconomic processes that signify the onset of modernity in Western evelopment discourse.¹