In 1954, the great African-American painter Jacob Lawrence conceived of a remarkable series of paintings that would, in his words, “depict the struggles of a people to create a nation and their attempt to build a democracy.” Initially, he had in mind a grand narrative beginning with the “causes and events leading into the American Revolutionary War” and ending in the early years of the twentieth century. As finally executed, Lawrence’s Struggle series of panels (1954–1956) extended chronologically from the 1770 Boston Massacre to the aftermath of the battle of New Orleans in 1815. Lawrence thereby placed the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 at the center of the path to American nationhood.

Recent changes in Enlightenment and Caribbean studies have made it possible to recover a distinctively Caribbean Enlightenment; doing so contributes to our understanding of French and British colonial societies and of the Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural movement. As inspired as metropolitan counterparts by ideologies of utility and improvement, colonists engaged in intellectual practices common in the metropole as their lives in profitable slave societies deeply informed their appropriations of Enlightenment ideas. Focusing chiefly on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica from the mid-eighteenth century into the 1790s, this book explores a Caribbean Enlightenment through four topics: natural history and intellectual friendship; the press and the public sphere; histories of the book and reading; and the agricultural Enlightenment. These themes illustrate that becoming “enlightened” made a distinctive colonial identity available to White male colonists, one that rejected metropolitan notions of Caribbean degeneracy and philistinism, redrew the line between free and unfree smudged by proximity and intimacy, and validated on a cultural basis the power to enslave.

The Introduction provides an overview of the Caribbean, its Indigenous peoples, particular colonial and slave histories, as well as migrant and immigrant pasts, all presented as reasons regarding why each island/country is culturally and musically distinct. Understanding Caribbean history is essential to understanding the musics of the islands. This introduction provides that broad summary of Caribbean history, emphasising its binding relationship with the music of the islands – a necessary task for understanding and appreciating forthcoming chapters of the book.