A geographical area consisting of the archipelago of islands that runs from the Yucatán Peninsula and Florida southeast to Venezuela, with the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica) in the north and the Lesser Antilles generally to the south and east. The Guianas and Belize are also included in the Caribbean region because of historical ties.
The Caribbean area was called the West Indies by the Europeans. The name “Caribbean” is derived from Los Caribes or “Carib,” a word coined by the Spanish colonizers to define the most militant group of indigenous people against European imperialism. “Carib” translated into the word “cannibal”—that is, flesh-eating humans. Gaztam-bide-Geigel, a Puerto Rican historian, argues that Caribbean, as a name applied to the region instead of West Indies, came into vogue in the context of U.S. expansionism in the late nineteenth century. The United States took over Puerto Rico in 1898, and in 1917 it bought Denmark’s Caribbean colonies, comprising Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, Saint John, and about fifty other tiny islands, for $25 million.
Perhaps, as historian R.R. Premdas points out, “the Caribbean as an unified region that confers a sense of common citizenship and community may be conceived as a figment of the imagination.” Despite such assertion, it is clear that the region has a distinguishable and distinctive character. As scholar Ralph E. Gonsalves observes, the “Caribbean civilisation… has evolved metaphorically from the songs of the indigenous people, the rhythm of Africa, the melody of Europe, the chords of Asia, and the lyrics of the Caribbean.” The region is therefore made up of different peoples, cultures, and languages unified by a colonial past, imperialism, and forms of economic and human exploitation. There are the Anglophone or English-speaking territories, the Hispanic or Spanish-speaking territories, the Dutch or Netherlands Antilles territories, and the Francophone or French-speaking territories. There are also creole languages, regional and nonstandard dialects, and ethnic vernaculars. French Creole or patois is spoken in places like Saint Lucia, Dominica, and Haiti. In the Dutch-speaking territories of Curacao (Netherlands Antilles), there is Papiamentu.
The definition of the Caribbean can therefore be based on language and identity, geography, history and culture, politics, and economics. Definitions of the Caribbean have been, and are being, continuously reworked in response to external and internal dynamics. Hence, in the twenty-first century the Caribbean is increasingly being used within the context of various diasporas, which means the Caribbean is a region of transnational entity.
Trade featured prominently in the colonization of the Caribbean. When Christopher Columbus stumbled on the region in 1492, it was in his quest to carve a new trade route for Spain. Spain monopolized trade in the region during the fifteenth century. To safeguard this monopoly, it organized a system of colonial administration that restricted the colonies to trading with the mother country.
During the sixteenth century, Spain continued to enjoy the benefits of trading Caribbean products. Other European nations soon challenged Spanish monopoly. By the seventeenth century, the Caribbean had become a contested territory for pirates, traders, and pioneers who were enticed by the prospects of great profits, with the Dutch emerging as the most aggressive actors. Soon, that small republic was posing an effective challenge to Spanish monopoly.
The English and French were also successful in breaking the Spanish monopoly and gaining a stronghold in the Caribbean, as they settled in islands not occupied by Spain. Before 1640, colonists of the Lesser Antilles did subsistence and cash crop farming. From the 1640s, sugarcane took center stage. This was in response to the growing demand for sugar on the European market. This demand for sugar created a revolution, in which there were drastic transformations of the landscape, demography, politics, and economy of the various territories as more plantations were established. The Caribbean was effectively integrated into rival European trading blocs on the basis of mercantilism, an economic policy that held that the colonies existed for the benefit of the colonial power.
To meet the labor-intensive nature of sugar-cane cultivation, enslaved Africans were introduced throughout the region. Thus, Caribbean society became characterized by cultural diversity. The slavery system disintegrated in most of the colonies in the nineteenth century: Haiti in 1793, the British in 1838, the other French colonies in 1848, Dutch in 1863, Danish in 1878, and Spanish in 1886. The freed citizens of the Caribbean now faced new challenges as they pursued economic and political aspirations. They got involved in protopeasant activities, wage bargaining, emigration, and entrepreneurial pursuits.
Throughout the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, the merchant-planter class retained political domination, as the political franchise was restricted to the largely white propertied class. By the 1930s, the world depression, persistent poverty, and political dissatisfaction led to a series of labor rebellions, riots, and unrests among the working-class people of the British Caribbean. The outcome of these proactive moves was that more representative governments were formed from around the 1950s. This was followed by the grant of political independence by Britain to many of its colonies from the early 1960s onward.
The Hispanic territory of Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) obtained its political independence from Spain 1844. It was the second Caribbean territory to become independent. The first was Haiti, which fought for and won its independence to become the first black republic in the region in 1804. The Spanish-American War of 1898, a conflict triggered by the alleged bombing of a U.S. warship, effectively ended the Spanish empire in the Caribbean. At the end of the war, Spain gave up control of Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuba therefore became independent in 1902. Puerto Rico, on the other hand, was annexed by the United States and was not constituted as a U.S. commonwealth until 1952.
In 1954, the Netherlands made its territories of Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire, Suriname, Saint Eustatius (or Statia), Saint Maarten, and Saba an autonomous department of the “Tripartite” Kingdom of the Netherlands. Independence was later granted to Suriname in 1975.
Independence posed new problems. The small island states of the Caribbean exerted little influence on the international scene. Many of them had access to similar resources that were used competitively. British Caribbean countries had began seeking alternatives to monocrop sugar economies from around the 1940s. Bauxite mining was developed in Guyana and Jamaica, while Trinidad and Tobago turned to oil production. The Netherland Antilles territory of Curaçao also started oil refining in this period. From around the 1940s as well, tourism was considered as a viable alternative to agriculture.
In 1968, the British Caribbean territories formed the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA). This initiative was an attempt at eco nomic union and Caribbean integration, a process that was consolidated in 1973 with the establishment of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). This Caribbean Common Market replaced CARIFTA. There have been efforts to broaden the base of intraregional cooperation. These initiatives include the Caribbean Forum, which links CARICOM with Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Another development has been the formation of the Association of Caribbean States linking the Circum and Greater Caribbean states with a Caribbean coast. In 2003, efforts were being expedited to create a Caribbean Single Market and Economy among CARICOM member states.
The main exports in the latter half of the twentieth century were primary products: sugar, bauxite, and oil. Some products are still being exported. At the same time, tourism, offshore financial services, and small-scale manufacturing have replaced agriculture. Imports into the region have been growing, although some territories have limited access to foreign exchange. By 2002, agriculture, as part of the global economy, was liable to the international trade and economic processes such as transnational capital and the moves toward trade liberalization were being led by the World Trade Organization (WTO). The smaller territories of the region have been asking the WTO for special and differential treatment.
Cleve McD. Scott
See also: British Empire; Mercantilism; Spanish Empire; United States.
Bolland, Nigel O. The Politics of Labour in the British Caribbean: The Social Origins of Authoritarianism and Democracy. Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2001.
Gaztambide-Geigel, Antonio. “La invención del Caribe en el Siglo XX: On the Definitions of the Caribbean as Historical, Methodological Problem.” Revista Mexicana del Caribe 1, no. 1 (1996): 75–96.
Gonsalves, Ralph E. “Westminster in the Caribbean: Viability, Past and Present, Prospects for Reform or Radical Departure.” Keynote address delivered to the Conference on Constitutional Reform in the Caribbean, January 21, 2002 (www.upd.oas.org/information/westminster%20in%20the%20caribbean1.doc, accessed September 2003).
Grossman, Lawrence S. The Political Ecology of Bananas: Contract Farming, Peasants, and Agrarian Change in the Eastern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
McIntyre, Arnold Meredith. Trade and Economic Development in Small Open Economies: The Case of the Caribbean Countries. London: Praeger, 1995.
Premdas, R.R. “The Caribbean: Ethnic and Cultural Diversity and a Typology of Identities.” In Identities, Ethnicity and Culture in the Caribbean, ed. R.R. Premdas. Saint Augustine, Trinidad: School of Continuing Studies, University of West Indies, 1999.
Ramsaran, Ramesh, ed. Caribbean Survival and the Global Challenge. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2002.
———. The Commonwealth Caribbean in the World Economy. London: Macmillan, 1989.
Richardson, Bonham C. The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Scott, Cleve McD. “Unity in Diversity?: A History of the Pan-Caribbean Region from 1492 to the 1970s.” In Introduction to the Pan-Caribbean, ed. Tracey Skelton. London: Arnold, 2004.