History of the Caribbean

From the arrival of the first Europeans in the region until the 1930s, plantations - building their fortunes on sugar, and to a lesser extent on cotton, indigo, tobacco, coffee, and bananas - brought unprecedented wealth to Old World owners, effected a fundamental shift in the landscape and economy of the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, saw the enslavement of first indigenous populations and then imported Africans, and led to bloody wars on both sides of the Atlantic over control of the l...