The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography

by Bonham C. Richardson

Overview

The Caribbean was Europe's first colony, its landscapes transformed to produce tropical staples and its decimated aboriginal populace replaced with African slaves. As European power has waned in the Caribbean, it has been replaced by the geopolitical domination of the United States. Professor Richardson examines this colonization and recolonization of the Caribbean during the past half millennium, portraying a region victimized by natural hazards, soil erosion, overpopulation and gunboat diplomacy. Most importantly, he explains the ways in which Caribbean peoples have reacted and adapted to their external influences. No other single survey of the region provides equivalent breadth—ranging from aboriginal ecologies to today's narcotic traffic—or harnesses so effectively elements of the past to illuminate the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521351867
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/16/1992
Series:	Geography of the World-Economy
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; 1. The creation of the Caribbean; 2. A colonised environment; 3. Plantations and their peoples to 1900; 4. The American century; 5. Economic dependency; 6. Human migrations; 7. Resistance and political independence; 8. Towards a geography of Caribbean nationhood; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

"...a well documented and eminently readable treatise. Further to its credit, Richardson's new Caribbean regional geography stresses two interwoven points: that the environmental bases of these islands have been fundamentally altered and devastated; and that the ensuing cycles of externally propelled settlement, economic exploitation, and dependent development which accompanied this peripheral region's early and continuing incorporation into international spheres of production and commerical enterprize were very much implicated in the recurrent patterns of destructive man-land relationships." The Professional Geographer

"Richardson's writing is lively and even powerful, as illustrated by the section in which he cogently covers the 1762 successful war of liberation by African slaves in Suriname, details of the Haitian revolution, the nineteenth-century rebellion by Cuba, and disorders in Puerto Rico and other colonies during the 1930s....highly recommended as a basic text for undergradutes." W. Marvin Will, Latin American Research Review

From the Publisher