©2000 National Council for the Social Studies. All rights reserved.

Caribbean Crucible:
History, Culture, and

Globalization 
Kevin A. Yelvington

In the present age of globalization, it is often forgotten that these world-encompassing processes were
initiated with European expansion into the Caribbean beginning more than five hundred years ago. We now see
the proliferation of overseas factories enabling owners, producers, and consumers of products to be in widely
distant locales. It seems to us that in the search for profits, commercial activity has recently spread to every
corner of the earth. We observe that the continual movement of humans across borders results in new forms of
hybrid and creolized cultures. And, we feel that the world around us is moving faster and faster: the rapid
circulation of images and information, the advent of cheap long-distance travel, and the attendant quickened
workplace demands all give us the impression that time is actually speeding up.

Rather than the beginning of something new, these global processes can be traced to when the Caribbean became
the site of Europe’s first industries, starting in the sixteenth century. At that time, industrial techniques and a
rational approach to time management were applied to the production and export of sugar, tobacco, and other
commodities to be consumed by the burgeoning European urban bourgeois, artisan, and working-classes. These
industries, in the forms of plantations and haciendas of various sizes, presaged and enabled Europe’s Industrial
Revolution.

These new enterprises were worked by millions of enslaved Africans hauled from diverse West African societies
from present-day Senegal all the way down to Angola; before them, by thousands of native slaves and European
indentured workers; and, after them, by hundreds of thousands of indentured workers from Africa, Europe’s
periphery, India, China, and even Java. Not only was it in the Caribbean where the first sustained European
external colonizations occurred, but these colonies required and stimulated the creation and marshaling of far-
flung trade and governmental networks—a truly global undertaking—with the aim of enriching imperial
treasuries and creating dependent territories in their service.

Reconsidering the Caribbean as an origin-point of the modern global system means more than an understanding
of the Caribbean’s role in the world. It means understanding the world’s role in the Caribbean, the constant back
and forth movement of people, ideas, and things, and the intricate interplay of forces at work in shaping
economies, societies, and cultures. It means donning a perspective that allows or, better, forces one to
simultaneously reckon the larger processes and the historical specificities of this complex world region.1

Conquest and Colonization

“In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue” begins the children’s rhyme. Not always,
however, do the North American children who recite it or their teachers who teach it acknowledge the gravity of
Columbus’s project or the world transformations that came in his wake. For North Americans, the emphasis on
Columbus’s voyage has involved chiefly the settlement of their continent. This leads to a failure to realize that
the primary axis of colonial expansion was decidedly to the south, where populations of indigenous peoples
were ill-equipped militarily to completely deter the invaders and possessed no resistance to the diseases the
Europeans brought with them. Columbus, hopelessly geographically confused, referred to the native inhabitants
as “Indians” and characterized some as noble savages and others as bloodthirsty cannibals, thus justifying
European intervention, Christian conversion, enslavement, and colonization.

The Caribbean was fortuitously situated in terms of soils, climate, and location to facilitate the westward
development of the nascent European sugar industry from Sicily, Spain, and the Atlantic islands. Columbus
brought the first sugar cane to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493; he brought it from the Spanish
Canary Islands. It is likely that enslaved Africans from Spain also accompanied him on that voyage,
foreshadowing the African-slave-sugar-commodity connection. In the Western hemisphere, sugar was first
grown in the present-day Dominican Republic and shipped back to Europe around 1516. With the rapid
destruction of the native populations, enslaved African laborers were imported shortly after the first canes were
planted, thus paving the way for the proliferation of the widespread and centuries-enduring plantation complex
and the rapid transformation of tastes and consumption in Europe.

One by one, at least six European powers entered the fray and wrestled with each over the riches to be obtained
from the region under colonization. Caribbean islands were exchanged as part of peace negotiations after
European wars, and sometimes captured outright by those countries that could muster the naval power so far
from their shores. The source of this wealth was the fruits of the labor of enslaved Africans. Commercial and
military intervention on the African coast ensured a supply of captive laborers for the plantations. The slave
trade represented the largest capital investment in the world, meaning that the slaves themselves were valuable
commodities, and was promoted and patronized by the royal families and leading merchants and politicians of
Europe.

Africans were enslaved and taken to the Americas, agricultural commodities were transported, often in the same
slaving vessels, from the Americas to Europe, and trade goods were shipped from Europe to Africa for more
slaves—the so-called “Triangular Trade.” More than nine million enslaved Africans reached the New World (see
Table 1), about 40 percent going to the Caribbean. Jamaica received nearly twice as many slaves as were
imported into the United States; Barbados and Martinique, tiny islands where plantation slavery was established
very early, each received roughly the amount received by the whole United States. While these figures cannot
take into account the many millions who died en route, they do provide an idea of the intensity of Caribbean
slavery. Caribbean slaves were notoriously malnourished, overworked, and susceptible to disease. They died in
droves. It was cheaper for planters to simply import new slaves than to maintain their existing labor forces, and
women were not encouraged to bear children until it appeared the slave trade would end.

While Caribbean slavery was diverse and no two islands had the same experience, the exigencies of the sugar
production process imposed certain common patterns. The climate dictated harvesting times. Fields were often
laid out according to geometric patterns, with a central mill and boiling house. Slaves were organized into three
or four “gangs,” ranging from the “great gang” of the most able-bodied field laborers under the command of a
driver who was a male slave, down to the “vine gang” comprised of the infirm and slave children as young as
four who did light tasks around the plantation. Women generally predominated in field labor, and in marketing
activities. Most of the skilled and prestigious tasks on the plantation were reserved for men. Slaves were
“allowed” to grow their own food—not because of the planters’ benevolence, but because it saved them money.

In the enslavement process and plantation slavery, Africans and Europeans—albeit drawn from diverse societies
on their respective continents—became “races.” In this process, Europeans and their descendants became
“white,” while Africans and their descendants became “black” in the sense that meanings associated with
physical attributes were culturally and ideologically systematized, elaborated, and given differential value. (This
did not mean that ethnic identities of Africans and Europeans did not continue to be salient in a given colony.
For example, ethnicity was implicated in slave revolts, and European colonists of differing nationality were
often at odds.) In the ideology of “racial slavery,” permanent enslaved status became attached only to Africans
and their descendants; it was automatically inherited by them at birth. At the same time, Europeans and those of
European descent protected each other from the rigors of the system and permanent slave status.
The pattern of ethnic relations varied somewhat from island to island. The Spanish and French, more than the
British or Dutch, developed elaborate social and legal distinctions for those “mixed race” individuals seen to
possess various amounts of black and white heritage. In all cases, ethnic identity was (and is) more complex and
nuanced, differing significantly from the United States’ black-white dichotomy, where “mixed” individuals were
placed in the “black” or at least “non-white” category (the ideology of “hypodescent”). But what was constant in
the Caribbean was (and in many respects still is) the valorization of European culture and “whiteness,” and the
depreciation of African roots and “blackness”—despite the fact that the vast majority of Caribbean people are of
African descent.

The ending of slavery was not a uniform process. Slavery was resisted everywhere—from grand marronage, the
formation of runaway communities, to petit marronage, individual acts of subversion and sabotage—and these
actions helped to speed up final emancipation. A dramatic slave uprising and revolution beginning in 1791 made
for an independent Haiti, only the second independent nation in the Americas (after the United States), in 1804.
In England, a combination of free market forces and humanitarian interests ended the slave trade in 1807, and
slavery by 1834-38. In Cuba, it was not until 1886 that the institution finally trickled away.

Post-Emancipation Society

The transition from slavery to freedom entailed hardship and conflict, followed by a period of adjustment for
both the ex-slaves and planters alike. Many ex-slaves continued to work on plantations, but more on their own
terms. Some formed peasant communities. As perhaps nowhere else in the world, so-called “reconstituted”
peasantries developed after capitalism. To save their profits in part by cutting the wages of the ex-slaves,
planters and the colonial state brought in indentured workers from around the world, and they lived in slave-like
conditions in the Caribbean.

Africans came to Jamaica and Trinidad. More than 125,000 indentured Chinese came to Cuba, Guyana, Jamaica,
and Trinidad. Indentured “Portuguese” from Madeira went to Trinidad and Guyana. From 1838 to 1917, more
than 400,000 indentured Indians were brought to Jamaica, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad (East Indians now
constitute 40 percent of the population of Trinidad and Tobago, and 55 percent of Guyana’s population); and
100,000 to Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana. Suriname also received 22,000 indentured Javanese.
Slavery (and indenture) left the legacy of divided loyalties, ethnic and class competition, and wide disparities in
wealth and access to resources that today imprints all aspects of Caribbean society, economics, and politics.

As the anti-slavery struggle finally ended, it gave way to the anti-colonial, nationalist struggle, a prominent
feature of twentieth-century Caribbean life, led for the most part by workers and their nascent organizations.2 At
the same time, European dominance gave way in large part, though not completely, to U.S. political, cultural,
and military hegemony—including a number of military interventions—which eventually brought tourists,
satellite television, the Internet, and the International Monetary Fund. This experience was also diverse (see
Table 2).

Political differences, linguistic diversity, and traditions and prejudices inherited from the differing colonial
powers have meant that the Caribbean has suffered from a lack of unity and insular worldviews. Islanders often
feel more in common with the colonial metropole than with the residents of the island next door who speak a
different language.

Culture and Creolization

If Caribbean people have been constrained in their political and economic relationships, it is perhaps these very
constraints that have generated the conditions for innovation and creativity that mark Caribbean cultural forms—
from language, religion, and music to family structure. As Derek Walcott, a Caribbean writer and winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote: “Colonials, we began with this malarial enervation: that nothing could
ever be built among these rotting shacks, barefooted backyards and moulting shingles; ... If there was nothing,
there was everything to be made.”3 And made they have. In 1992, the quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage,
Caribbean litterateurs won Europe’s most prestigious writing prizes. Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau
was awarded France’s Prix Goncourt, Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz won Spain’s Cervantes Prize, and
Walcott, from tiny St. Lucia, won the Nobel.

Caribbean music—reggae, calypso, salsa, merengue, rhumba—has gained worldwide notoriety and acceptance
and influenced other musical styles. Performers such as the Mighty Sparrow, Celia Cruz, and the late Bob
Marley have achieved worldwide fame, and to these names could be added many others. Trinidadian carnival
masker Peter Minshall was artistic director for the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1992 Olympics in
Barcelona, the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, and the 1994 World Cup opening ceremony in the United States.
Novelists and poets including Jamaica Kincaid, V.S. Naipaul, and Kamau Brathwaite have found homes and
followings abroad while their work is still identifiable as Caribbean. But these attainments are not the only
consequences of Caribbean culture building.

The practice of everyday life as well as the development of expressive and communicative culture and religion
might fruitfully be seen through the prism of creolization. “Creole,” from the Spanish criollo meaning “of local
origin,” is to be understood in at least three senses. One is the general idea of a cultural blending, of more than
one cultural tradition becoming transformed under local conditions to something unlike its antecedents—a
process of change with early documentation in the Caribbean, and which even began on the slave ships
themselves. But rather than an easy assimilation, as described by the United States’ “melting pot” model that has
its counterparts in the Caribbean, creolization occurred and occurs in the context of differences in social power.
Creolization may be more pronounced in some areas of culture than in others; it depends on historical context
and sets its own standards.

Afro-Caribbean family forms, with the prevalence of female-headed households, single parenthood, and
common-law marriage, are thus not somehow “deviant.” They have to be seen in their historical development
and as strategies by men and (especially) women devised in the context of scarcity. Creolization is evident in
syncretic Caribbean religions and their uses to oppose the established order. These include santería (sometimes
called regla ocha or lukumí) and palo monte mayombe in Cuba; vodou in Haiti; the orisha religion in Trinidad;
obeah in the English-speaking Caribbean; and Kumina, Myal, Revival and Rastafarianism—with its explicit
evocations of Africa—in Jamaica. Caribbean music and art forms, such as Carnival in Trinidad and Cuba and
Jonkonnu in Jamaica, are complex outcomes of the creolization process that include African-derived, European-
derived, and even Amerindian-derived strains. Such art and stylized play involves resistance and opposition.

A second sense of “creole” describes a kind of language situation. Creole forms of speech exist throughout the
Caribbean, and therefore the terms “Dutch-speaking,” “English-speaking,” and “French-speaking” Caribbean are
somewhat misleading. The term “pidgin” refers to specialized trade or contact jargons, and a creole language
comes into existence when populations in contact engage in regular interaction and the pidgin becomes the
language of the home—a first language, expanding the language’s functions and scope.

Besides multilingualism, bilingualism, and monolingualism, the Caribbean also exhibits “diglossia,” the
language form created when two codes exist, sharing one level (for example, vocabulary) but differing at other
levels (for example, in pronunciation and grammar). In Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, for instance, French
is the official language (used in legal proceedings, on television, and in schools), while creole is spoken on the
streets and in the home in informal conversation. A “postcreole continuum” describes variation between a creole
and a standard language of the same vocabulary, with Jamaica providing a prime example.

As Table 3 shows, the Caribbean is characterized by its linguistic heterogeneity and complexity. Everyday
Caribbean speech is lively and vibrant, and much is informed by African language structures. Indeed, African
words from Yoruba, Kikongo, and other languages even show up in present-day religious ceremonies. Language
situations demonstrate hierarchy as well. Despite recent attempts at local language promotion and celebration,
the old European (and current North American) depiction of the languages of Africans and their descendants as
somehow deficient remains in some quarters in the Caribbean. When their value is acknowledged, creole
languages and local forms of speech are (incorrectly) thought to be useful only to convey folklore traditions, not
abstract or theoretical thought.

Finally, “creole” is used to claim indigenousness and authenticity. Upper- and middle-class elites often
appropriate what they see as lower-class forms of popular culture—such as music or carniva#151;elevating it to
“nationa#148; status and themselves to the role of representatives and champions of the common folk. What is
emphasized is the cultural fusion of old elements to create something new, something quintessentially local, such
as the development of the jíbaro identity in Puerto Rico through the use of folklore. In another example, the
Martinican writers of créolité celebrate various cultural contributions to Martinican culture, but this is really tied
to their attempts to promote a cosmopolitanism that justifies their class and social position. But these discourses
may generate opposition. Some religions, for example, represent themselves as entailing “pure” African
practices. In any case, identity politics today are seriously compromised and caught up in commercialism and
international advertising.

People on the Move

Not only does Caribbean cultural production move in international orbits. Caribbean people do, too. Movement
has always been a feature of Caribbean society, and its very basis is caught up in the idea of migration. Planters
and colonial officials often saw their Caribbean sojourns as temporary. Enslaved Africans were dragged from
their homelands and, being regarded as chattel, were often sold, moving from plantation to plantation and from
island to island. Indentured workers came with the intention of returning, but only a small percentage ever did.

After slavery, Caribbean people moved around the region and beyond in search of the few opportunities
available. After the Haitian Revolution, white and muacirc;tre planters and their slaves fled to Cuba and to
Louisiana. In the 1850s, West Indians worked on the Panama railroad. In the 1880s, at least 50,000 workers—
mostly Jamaicans—were involved in the French attempt to build the Panama Canal, while Cuban cigar workers
migrated with their factories to Key West and Tampa, Florida.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, perhaps 150,000 Caribbeans migrated to Central America to work on
the U.S. Panama Canal and for U.S. fruit companies. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of workers went
from Jamaica, Haiti, and the Leeward Islands to Cuba and the Dominican Republic to cut cane, many facing
nativistic hostility. Others headed to the oil industry in Curaçao, Aruba, and Venezuela. Sizeable Caribbean
communities were formed in New York, Boston, and Miami. After World War II, West Indians were recruited to
work in the United Kingdom, and Caribbeans also settled in Paris and Amsterdam.

Caribbean intellectuals and political leaders often got their start abroad. Cuban patriot José Martí worked for the
independence of his island while living in New York, Tampa, and Key West. Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey ran
his Universal Negro Improvement Association—which once boasted nearly 1,000 branches internationally—
from Harlem, where he was part of a burgeoning West Indian community in the early decades of the twentieth
century. Puerto Rican bibliophile and political activist Arthur Schomburg was part of a radical Caribbean
tradition in the United States of the 1920s and 1930s. Trinidadian Marxist thinker and historian C.L.R. James
was based for much of his life in London. And writer Aimé Césaire of Martinique wrote the first version of
Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land) in Paris in the 1930s. This was the
most important document of the négritude movement—cultural politics designed to create and foster a positive
black identity.

As innumerable studies of Caribbean immigrant groups in North America have shown, these people have
dramatically altered their new communities, enriching local cultures with their carnival, music, entrepreneurial
ways, work ethic, political activism, and love of education. Afro-Caribbean religions have also found new
adherents in immigrant communities and beyond. Concentrated in Toronto, in Florida, and in the northeastern
United States where their numbers are growing (see Table 4), Caribbean migrants are often better positioned
with regard to education and resources than are many natives of the United States. There has been friction with
African Americans and Latinos, as well as moments of cooperation.
Conservative middle-class Cuban exiles with Caribbean political clout were able to affect U.S. immigration law
during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The differential treatment of Cuban and Haitian refugees arriving in
rickety vessels in South Florida—Cubans accepted, Haitians deported—had everything to do with U.S. ethnic
relations, Cold War politics, and the class and social position of the immigrant communities. Some migrants
defined in the Caribbean as mulato, “mixed,” “brown,” or even “white,” who have distanced themselves from
blacks, find themselves classified in the United States as black or lumped into the vast Hispanic category.

Many Caribbean people abroad keep one foot in the new setting and one foot back home, following political
developments and providing financial and emotional support to kin from afar. Remittances to Jamaica, Cuba,
and the Dominican Republic, for example, are in the hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars annually. But the vast
movement of people and things is and always has been Caribbean, showing in another way how the Caribbean
anticipated and now exemplifies the modern globalized world.

Notes

1. Some good general introductory works on the Caribbean are listed below under “References.”

2. O. Nigel Bolland, On the March: Labour Rebellionis in the British Caribbean, 1934-39 (Kingston: Ian
Randle, 1995).

3. Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says,” in Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1972).

References

Knight, Franklin W. The Caribbean: Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990.

Knight, Franklin W., and Colin A Palmer, eds. The Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989.

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985.

————— Caribbean Transformations. 3rd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

Mintz, Sidney W., and Sally Price, eds. Caribbean Contours. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985.

Mintz, Sidney W,. and Richard Price. The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Approach.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Parry, J.H., Philip Sherlock, and Anthony P. Maingot. A Short History of the West Indies. 4th ed. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1987.

Richardson, Bonham C. The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Further Reading

Beckles, Hilary and Verene Shepherd, eds. Caribbean Freedom: Economy and Society from Emancipation to the
Present. Kingston: Ian Randle, 1993.
Brereton, Bridget, and Kevin A. Yelvington, eds. The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Post-
emancipation Social and Cultural History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999.

Chomsky, Aviva. West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1996.

Conniff, Michael L. Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904-1981. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1985.

Croucher, Sheila L. Imagining Miami: Ethnic Politics in a Postmodern World. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1997.

Foner, Nancy, ed. New Immigrants in New York. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Fraginals, Manuel Moreno, Frank Moya Pons and Stanley L. Engerman, eds. Between Slavery and Free Labor:
The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985.

García, María Cristina. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959-1994.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Goveia, Elsa V. “The West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century.” Revista de Ciencias Sociales 4, no. 1
(1960): 75-105.

Grasmuck, Sherri, and Patricia R. Pessar. Between Two Islands: Dominican International Migration. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991.

Grenier, Guillermo J., and Alex Stepick III, eds. Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Change.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992.

Henry, Frances. The Caribbean Diaspora in Toronto: Learning to Live with Racism. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1994.

Ho, Christine G.T. Salt-Water Trinnies: Afro-Trinidadian Immigrant Networks and Non-Assimilation in Los
Angeles. New York: AMS Press, 1991.

James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century
America. London: Verso, 1998.

Kasinitz, Philip. Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1992.

Payne, Anthony and Paul Sutton, eds. Modern Caribbean Politics. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993.

Price, Sally, and Richard Price. Maroon Arts: Cultural Vitality in the African Diaspora. Boston: Beacon Press,
1999.

Purcell, Trevor W. Banana Fallout: Class, Color, and Culture Among West Indians in Costa Rica. Los Angeles:
Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles, 1993.

Richardson, Bonham C. The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Sala-Molins, Louis. Le Code Noir; ou, Le Calvaire de Canaan. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987.
Scott, Rebecca J. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860- 1899. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986.

Smith, M.G. West Indian Family Structure. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962.

Smith, R.T. The Matrifocal Family: Power, Pluralism, and Politics. London: Routledge, 1996.

Sutton, Constance R., and Elsa M. Chaney, eds. Caribbean Life in New York City: Sociocultural Dimensions.
New York: Center for Migration Studies of New York, 1987.

Watkins-Owens, Irma. Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900-1930.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Wilson, Samuel M., ed. The Indigenous People of the Caribbean. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.

Kevin A. Yelvington is a professor of anthropology at the University of South Florida, Tampa.