A Caribbean Enlightenment


Book Description

Explores the intersection of Enlightenment ideas and colonial realities amongst White, male colonists in the eighteenth-century French and British Caribbean. For them, becoming 'enlightened' meant diversion, status seeking, satisfying curiosity about the tropical environment, and making sense of the brutal societies and the enslaved Africans.




General History of the Caribbean


Book Description

The title of Volume IV of the General History of the Caribbean, the Long Nineteenth Century, indicates its range, from the last years of the eighteenth to the first two decades of the twentieth. The volume begins during the hegemony of the European nations and the social and economic dominance of the slave masters. It ends with the hegemony of the United States of America and the economic dominance of American and European agricultural and mercantile corporations. The chapters provide thematic accounts of societies emerging from slavery at different times during the century and also of the circumstances that affected the extent to which these societies were autochthonous within their various territories. The book's survey of this span of 150 years begins with the Haitian Revolution and its repercussions both within the region and outside. It then examines in turn the variety of ways in which the emancipated, their ex-masters and the colonial powers related to each other in the economy, polity and society of various territories; the economy of sugar in decline; the hostility of local landed elites to the welfare of the emancipated, to the ways landless labourers adapted to survive, and to interregional migrations; the social and cultural transformations of new populations from Africa, India and China; the technical innovations in the sugar industry towards the end of the century that differentiate the interests of field owner from factory owner; the decline of white pre-eminence, yet their resistance to claims for autonomy and an end to colonial tutelage





Book Description




Building the French empire, 1600–1800


Book Description

This study explores the shared history of the French empire from the perspective of material culture in order to re-evaluate the participation of colonial, Creole, and indigenous agency in the construction of imperial spaces. The decentred approach to a global history of the French colonial realm allows a new understanding of power relations in different locales. Providing case studies from four parts of the French empire, the book draws on illustrative evidence from the French archives in Aix-en-Provence and Paris as well as local archives in each colonial location. The case studies, in the Caribbean, Canada, Africa, and India, each examine building projects to show the mixed group of planners, experts, and workers, the composite nature of building materials, and elements of different ‘glocal’ styles that give the empire its concrete manifestation. Building the French empire gives a view of the French overseas empire in the early modern period not as a consequence or an outgrowth of Eurocentric state-building, but rather as the result of a globally interconnected process of empire-building.




Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire


Book Description

Spanning from the West African coast to the Canadian prairies and south to Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Guiana, France's Atlantic empire was one of the largest political entities in the Western Hemisphere. Yet despite France's status as a nation at the forefront of architecture and the structures and designs from this period that still remain, its colonial building program has never been considered on a hemispheric scale. Drawing from hundreds of plans, drawings, photographic field surveys, and extensive archival sources, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire focuses on the French state's and the Catholic Church's ideals and motivations for their urban and architectural projects in the Americas. In vibrant detail, Gauvin Alexander Bailey recreates a world that has been largely destroyed by wars, natural disasters, and fires – from Cap-François (now Cap-Haïtien), which once boasted palaces in the styles of Louis XV and formal gardens patterned after Versailles, to failed utopian cities like Kourou in Guiana. Vividly illustrated with examples of grand buildings, churches, and gardens, as well as simple houses and cottages, this volume also brings to life the architects who built these structures, not only French military engineers and white civilian builders, but also the free people of colour and slaves who contributed so much to the tropical colonies. Taking readers on a historical tour through the striking landmarks of the French colonial landscape, Architecture and Urbanism in the French Atlantic Empire presents a sweeping panorama of an entire hemisphere of architecture and its legacy.




The Creole Archipelago


Book Description

In The Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region. Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados. By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference.




Desperate in Saint Martin Notes on Guillaume Coppier


Book Description

This book on Guillaume Coppier (1606 1674), the early 17th-century French traveler, indentured servant, colonist, mariner, moralist, baroque chronicler, antiquarian, humanist, sometime pirate and slaver of sorts, is essentially a reading of Coppier, the man and his chronicle. Coppiers Histoire et voyage des Indes Occidentales, et de plusieurs autres rgions maritimes, & esloignes (History and Voyage to the West Indies and to Several Other Maritime and Faraway Regions) was published in Lyon in 1645. Given its objective and context, this effortpart amateur historiography and translation and part novice commentary and interpretationis also a survey of past appraisals of Coppiers chronicle. Like all such endeavors, this essay informs on the essayist; it is a sort of voyage, and a long one at that.




Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance


Book Description

In Caribbean and Atlantic Diaspora Dance: Igniting Citizenship, Yvonne Daniel provides a sweeping cultural and historical examination of diaspora dance genres. In discussing relationships among African, Caribbean, and other diasporic dances, Daniel investigates social dances brought to the islands by Europeans and Africans, including quadrilles and drum-dances as well as popular dances that followed, such as Carnival parading, Pan-Caribbean danzas,rumba, merengue, mambo, reggae, and zouk. Daniel reviews sacred dance and closely documents combat dances, such as Martinican ladja, Trinidadian kalinda, and Cuban juego de maní. In drawing on scores of performers and consultants from the region as well as on her own professional dance experience and acumen, Daniel adeptly places Caribbean dance in the context of cultural and economic globalization, connecting local practices to transnational and global processes and emphasizing the important role of dance in critical regional tourism.




The Torrid Zone


Book Description

The first comparative history of European settlers’ trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean. Brimming with new perspectives and cutting-edge research, the essays collected in The TorridZone explore colonization and cultural interaction in the Caribbean from the late 1600s to the early 1800s—a period known as the “long” seventeenth century—a time when these encounters varied widely and the diverse actors were not yet fully enmeshed in the culture and power dynamics of master-slave relations. The events of this era would profoundly affect the social and political development both of the colonies that Europeans established in the Caribbean and the wider world. This book is the first to offer comparative treatments of Danish, Dutch, English, and French trading, pirating, and colonizing activities in the Caribbean and analysis of the corresponding interactions among people of African, European, and Native origin. The contributions range from an investigation of the indigenous colonization of the Lesser Antilles by the Kalinago to a look at how the Anglo-Dutch wars in Europe affected relations between the English inhabitants and the Dutch government of Suriname. Among the other essays are incisive examinations of the often-neglected history of Danish settlement in the Virgin Islands, attempts to establish French colonial authority over the pirates of Saint-Domingue, and how the Caribbean blueprint for colonization manifested itself in South Carolina through enslavement of Amerindians and the establishment of plantation agriculture. The extensive geographic, demographic, and thematic concerns of this collection shed a clear light on the socioeconomic character of the “Torrid Zone” before and during the emergence and extension of the sugar-and-slaves complex that came to define this region. The book is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the social, political, and economic sensibilities to which the operators around the Caribbean subscribed as well as to our understanding of what they did, offering in turn a better comprehension of the consequences of their behavior. “Covering a variety of undertakings, especially English but also Dutch, Danish, French and indigenous, this collection makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of a pivotal period in the history of the West Indies.” —Carla Gardina Pestana, University of California, Los Angeles “This illuminating collection of essays brings the Caribbean squarely into the frame of analysis strongly making the case that the experiences and developments of the Caribbean colonies remained crucial to the history of colonial America. The contributions cover the centrality of enslaved people’s labor and the actions of Indigenous and peoples of African descent who shaped the history of the region through their resistance, accommodation, and engagement.” —Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Bryn Mawr College