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  • Cited by 16
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
June 2012
Print publication year:
2010
Online ISBN:
9780511976131

Book description

A Concise History of the Caribbean presents a general history of the Caribbean islands from the beginning of human settlement about seven thousand years ago to the present. It narrates processes of early human migration, the disastrous consequences of European colonization, the development of slavery and the slave trade, the extraordinary profits earned by the plantation economy, the great revolution in Haiti, movements toward political independence, the Cuban Revolution, and the diaspora of Caribbean people. Written in a lively and accessible style yet current with the most recent research, the book provides a compelling narrative of Caribbean history essential for students and visitors.

Reviews

‘A first-rate interpretive overview that at present has no equal, by a master historian and insightful scholar.’

David Barry Gaspar - Duke University

‘This is the best short general history available on the Caribbean, covering the area with magisterial authority as well as enviable comprehensiveness and competence.’

Franklin W. Knight - The Johns Hopkins University

‘An excellent comparative history by a leading historian of the Caribbean … a perceptive analysis of West Indian people and their environment from ancient times to the present.’

Kenneth Morgan - Brunel University

‘In this fast-paced, compact text, the prolific B. W. Higman chronicles familiar and new life-changing episodes in the history of those who settled voluntarily or involuntarily in the complex space we call the Caribbean.’

Verene A. Shepherd - University of the West Indies

‘A compelling narrative of the rich history of the Caribbean. Higman provides a comprehensive introduction in an accessible style.’

Source: Living Abroad Magazine

'… a lively, well-written, and thorough work that will be useful to students, to scholars wishing to catch up on the history of this region, and - it is hoped - to the general reader.'

Asa McKercher Source: Canadian Journal of History

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Contents

Suggestions for Further Reading
General Works
Beckles, Hilary McD, A History of Barbados from Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Brereton, Bridget, A History of Modern Trinidad 1783–1962 (Kingston: Heinemann, 1981)
Cambeira, Alan, Quisqueya la Bella: The Dominican Republic in Historical and Cultural Perspective (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997)
Craton, Michael and Gail, Saunders, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992 [volume 1], 1998 [volume 2])
Curet, L. Antonio, Dawdy, Shannon Lee, and Gabino, Rosa, Corzo (eds), Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005)
Dietz, James L, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986)
Emmer, P. C, The Dutch Slave Trade, 1500–1850 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006)
Monzote, Reinaldo Funes, From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)
Galloway, J. H, The Sugar Cane Industry: An Historical Geography from Its Origins to 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Kuss, Malena (ed), Music in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Encyclopedic History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004–2007)
McNeill, J. R, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Mintz, Sidney W, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985)
Carrión, Arturo Morales, Puerto Rico: A Political and Cultural History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1983)
O'Loughlin, Karen Fay and James F, Lander, Caribbean Tsunamis: A 500-Year History from 1498–1998 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003)
Louis A, Pérez, Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
Bonham C, Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
David, Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)
Charles A, Woods and Florence E, Sergile (eds), Biogeography of the West Indies: Patterns and Perspectives (Boca Raton, LA: CRC Press, 2001, second edition)
Before 1492
Allsworth-Jones, P, Pre-Columbian Jamaica (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008)
Lesley-Gail, Atkinson (ed), The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taíno (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006)
Curet, L. Antonio, Caribbean Paleodemography: Population, Culture History, and Sociopolitical Processes in Ancient Puerto Rico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005)
Delpuech, André and Corinne L, Hofman (eds), Late Ceramic Age Societies in the Eastern Caribbean (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2004)
Keegan, William F, The People Who Discovered Columbus: The Prehistory of the Bahamas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992)
Keegan, William F, Taíno Indian Myth and Practice: The Arrival of the Stranger King (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007)
Moure, Ramón Dacal and Manuel, Rivero de la Calle, Art and Archaeology of Pre-Columbian Cuba (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996)
Newsom, Lee A and Elizabeth S, Wing, On Land and Sea: Native American Uses of Biological Resources in the West Indies (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004)
Reid, Basil A, Myths and Realities of Caribbean History (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009)
Rouse, Irving, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992)
Siegel, Peter E (ed), Ancient Borinquen: Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Native Puerto Rico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005)
Stevens-Arroyo, Antonio M, Cave of the Jagua: The Mythological World of the Taínos (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988)
Sued-Badillo, Jalil (ed), General History of the Caribbean, Volume I: Autochthonous Societies (Paris: UNESCO Publishing/London: Macmillan, 2003)
Whitmore, Thomas M and Turner, B.L II, Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
Wilson, Samuel M, The Archaeology of the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Wilson, Samuel M, Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990)
Wilson, Samuel M (ed), The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997)
1492–1630
David, Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008)
Andrews, Kenneth R, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)
Deagan, Kathleen and José María, Cruxent, Columbus's Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
Emmer, Pieter C (ed), General History of the Caribbean, Volume II: The Caribbean in the Long Sixteenth Century (Paris: UNESCO Publishing/London: Macmillan, 1999)
Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 1492: The Year Our World Began (London: Bloomsbury, 2010)
Fuente, Alejandro, Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)
Hulme, Peter, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986)
Padrón, Francisco Morales, Spanish Jamaica (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2003)
Phillips, William D, Jr., and Carla, Rahn Phillips, The Worlds of Christopher Columbus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Gómez, Nicolás Wey, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008)
1630–1770
Boucher, Philip P., France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent? (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)
Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
Bush, Barbara, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1832 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989)
Garraway, Doris, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
Gaspar, David Barry, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master–Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)
Hill, Errol, The Jamaican Stage 1655–1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992)
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Latimer, Jon, Buccaneers of the Caribbean: How Piracy Forged an Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)
Moitt, Bernard, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)
Mulcahy, Matthew, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)
Paquette, Robert L and Engerman, Stanley L (eds), The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996)
Schwartz, Stuart B (ed), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
Sheridan, Richard B, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
Smith, S. D., Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Weaver, Karol K, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006)
1770–1870
Bergad, Laird W, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)
Buckridge, Steeve O, The Language of Dress: Resistance and Accommodation in Jamaica, 1760–1890 (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2004)
Chinea, Jorge Luis, Race and Labor in the Hispanic Caribbean: The West Indian Immigrant Worker Experience in Puerto Rico, 1800–1850 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005)
Cox, Edward L, Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St Kitts and Grenada, 1763–1833 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984)
Dubois, Laurent, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2004)
Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)
Fick, Carolyn E, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990)
Figueroa, Luis A, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Garrigus, John D, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Geggus, David Patrick, Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of St Domingue, 1793–1798 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981)
Hall, Neville A. T, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies: St Thomas, St John and St Croix (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 1992)
Heuman, Gad J., “The Killing Time”: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (London: Macmillan, 1994)
Higman, B. W., Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)
Johnson, Howard, The Bahamas from Slavery to Servitude, 1783–1933 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1996)
Knight, Franklin W (ed), General History of the Caribbean, Volume III: The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (Paris: UNESCO Publishing/London: Macmillan, 1997)
Kuethe, Allan J, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986)
Matthews, Gelien, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006)
McClellan III, James E., Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Paquette, Robert L, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of “La Escalera” and the Conflict Between Empires Over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988)
Paton, Diana, No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
Rodríguez, Félix V. Matos, Women and Urban Change in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1820–1868 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999)
Scarano, Francisco A, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)
Shepherd, Verene A, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009)
Shepherd, Verene A (ed), Slavery Without Sugar: Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society since the 17th Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002)
Stinchcombe, Arthur L, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995)
Thompson, Alvin O, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006)
1870–1945
Ayala, César J., American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean 1898–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Baptiste, Fitzroy André, War, Cooperation, and Conflict: The European Possessions in the Caribbean, 1939–1945 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988)
Bryan, Patrick, The Jamaican People, 1880–1902: Race, Class and Social Control (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1991)
Campbell, Carl, The Young Colonials: A Social History of Education in Trinidad and Tobago, 1834–1939 (Kingston: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1996)
Dash, J. Michael, Literature and Ideology in Haiti, 1915–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1981)
Dye, Alan, Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899–1929 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)
Ferrer, Ada, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Healy, David, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898–1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988)
Hoetink, H., The Dominican People 1850–1900: Notes for a Historical Sociology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)
Holt, Thomas C., The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
Martínez-Vergne, Teresita, Capitalism in Colonial Puerto Rico: Central San Vicente in the Late Nineteenth Century (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992)
Moore, Brian L and Johnson, Michele A, Neither Led nor Driven: Contesting British Cultural Imperialism in Jamaica, 1865–1920 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004)
Fraginals, Manuel Moreno, Pons, Frank Moya, and Engerman, Stanley L (eds), Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985)
Pérez, Louis A, Jr., Cuba Between Empires, 1878–1902 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983)
Pérez, Louis A, Jr., Cuba Under the Platt Amendment, 1902–1934 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1986)
Plummer, Brenda Gayle, Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988)
Richardson, Bonham C, Caribbean Migrants: Environment and Human Survival on St Kitts and Nevis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983)
Roorda, Eric Paul, The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998)
Scott, Rebecca J, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985)
Shepherd, Verene A, Transients to Settlers: The Experience of Indians in Jamaica 1845–1950 (Leeds: Peepal Tree Books, 1994)
Smith, Matthew J., Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988)
Zanetti, Oscar and García, Alejandro, Sugar and Railroads: A Cuban History, 1837–1959 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
After 1945
Aldrich, Robert and Connell, John, The Last Colonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Alvarez, José, Cuba's Agricultural Sector (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004)
Ameringer, Charles D, The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000)
Argote-Freyre, Frank, Fulgencio Batista: From Revolutionary to Strongman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006)
Beckles, Hilary McD and Stoddart, Brian (eds), Liberation Cricket: West Indies Cricket Culture (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 1995)
Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992)
Brereton, Bridget (ed), General History of the Caribbean, Volume V: The Caribbean in the Twentieth Century (Paris: UNESCO Publishing/London: Macmillan, 2004)
Campbell, Carl, Endless Education: Main Currents in the Education System of Modern Trinidad and Tobago, 1939–1986 (Kingston: The Press, University of the West Indies, 1997)
Chevannes, Barry, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1995)
Chevannes, Barry (ed), Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews (London: Macmillan, 1998)
Clegg, Peter, The Caribbean Banana Trade: From Colonialism to Globalization (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
Díaz-Briquets, Sergio and Pérez-López, Jorge, Conquering Nature: The Environmental Legacy of Socialism in Cuba (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000)
Farber, Samuel, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
Gray, Obika, Demeaned but Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004)
Heine, Jorge (ed), A Revolution Aborted: The Lessons of Grenada (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990)
Kempadoo, Kamala (ed), Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999)
Kirk, John M, Between God and the Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1989)
Klein, Alan M, Sugarball: The American Game, the Dominican Dream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991)
Klepak, Hal, Cuba's Military 1990–2005: Revolutionary Soldiers during Counter-Revolutionary Times (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Knight, Franklin W and Martínez-Vergne, Teresita (eds), Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context (Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2005)
Knight, Franklin W and Palmer, Colin A (eds), The Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)
Krohn-Hansen, Christian, Political Authoritarianism in the Dominican Republic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Monteith, Kathleen E. A, Depression to Decolonization: Barclays Bank (DCO) in the West Indies, 1926–1962 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2008)
Parker, Jason C, Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937–1962 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Pérez Jr, Louis A., On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
Plummer, Brenda Gayle, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992)
Portes, Alejandro, Dore-Cabral, Carlos and Landolt, Patricia (eds), The Urban Caribbean: Transition to the New Global Economy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
Potter, Robert B, Barker, David, Conway, Dennis and Klak, Thomas, The Contemporary Caribbean (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Ltd., 2004)
Sagás, Ernesto, Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000)
Schoultz, Lars, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Haiti: State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990)
Yelvington, Kevin A (ed), Trinidad Ethnicity (London: Macmillan, 1993)

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