The Caribbean is named for its sea but the islands define the region and make its history. As a marine environment, the Caribbean Sea is a creation of the land that encloses it, with an unbroken continental coastline to the south and west, and a permeable but continuous arc of islands facing the Atlantic Ocean. Without the islands there would be no sea. The water would be nothing more than another stretch in the fluid maritime history of the ocean. Equally significant, the islands of the Caribbean surround and demarcate the Sea rather than sitting in it. This geographical formation determined fundamental features in the development of the Caribbean and distinguished the experience of the region from that of other island histories around the world.

Islands can be scattered in many different kinds of patterns. Sometimes they stand alone, in splendid isolation, but often they occur in groups or clusters. The tropical Atlantic from the Caribbean to the coast of Africa is almost empty of islands. In this vast oceanic zone, islands are small, few in number, and extremely isolated. The islands of the Caribbean, by contrast, are numerous and vary greatly in size (Map 1.1). What determines the uniqueness of the Caribbean islands as a whole is the way they form an archipelago, spread through an extensive arc with large bodies of water to each side, and the way the archipelago floats free of the mainland. The Caribbean Sea, like the Atlantic, is largely empty of islands.