Key issues and texts: The Caribbean in World History
Seminar 1: Introduction to the Course – Conquest, The Colombian Exchange, and Spanish Mercantilism
Key texts
- Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, 30th Anniversary Edition Westport : Praeger. 2003
- David Henige “On the Contact Population of Hispaniola: History as Higher Mathematics” HAHR, 1972
Further Reading
- Barry Higman, Concise History of the Caribbean, CUP, 2010
- Francisco Watlington “Cassava and Carrying Capacity in Aboriginal Puerto Rico: Revisiting the Taino Downfall at Conquest,” Southeastern Geographer Vol. 49, No. 4, Special Issue: The Geographies of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico (Winter 2009)
- Kathleen Deegan “Reconsidering Taíno Social Dynamics after Spanish Conquest: Gender and Class in Culture Contact Studies,” American Antiquity Vol. 69, No. 4 (Oct., 2004)
Seminar 2: Economic Foundations: Slavery and the Atlantic Sugar Complex
Key texts
- Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Atlantic Plantation Complex (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
- David Eltis and David Richardson, Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis, 2013)
Further Reading
- Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1986)
- Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997)
- The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Seminar 3: Slave Resistance, Emancipation and the Age of Revolutions
Key texts
- David Patrick Geggus, "Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1815," in David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus eds. A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1997) pp. 1-32. (Moodle)
- Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)
Further Reading
- James Marlon, The Book of Night Women (New York: Riverhead Books, 2009)
- Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)
- C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
- John Thornton, “‘I am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Ideology in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (1993): 181-214.
- John Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25 (1993): 51-80.
Seminar 4: 'Capitalism and Slavery' or Moral Econocide, the Williams Thesis and the Question of Abolition from Above
Key texts
- Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1994)
- Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2010)
Further Reading
- Christopher Leslie Brown, and Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture Staff, Moral Capital Foundations of British Abolitionism. (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2012)
- Thomas Bender, John Ashworth, David Brion Davis, and Thomas L. Haskell, The antislavery debate: capitalism and abolitionism as a problem in historical interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)
Seminar 5: The Second Slavery, Postemancipation Societies, and The Question of Cuba
Key texts
- Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007).
- Sidney Mintz, “Origins of Reconstituted Peasantries” in Caribbean Transformations. (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1974) pgs. 131-157. (Moodle)
Further Reading
- Dale Tomich, ed. The Politics of the Second Slavery (Binghamton, NY: SUNY Press, 2017)
- Thomas C. Holt, The problem of freedom: race, labor, and politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938. (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
- Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: race, nation, and revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1999)
Seminar 6: The Panama Canal, Yankee Imperialism, and the Caribbean as 'Backyard'
Key texts
- Peter James Hudson, Bankers and Empire: how Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Further Reading
- Hans Schmidt, The United States occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995)
- Bruce Calder, The impact of intervention: the Dominican Republic during the U.S. occupation of 1916-1924 (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2006)
- Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu, The big ditch: how America took, built, ran, and ultimately gave away the Panama Canal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)
Seminar 7: The Twentieth Century Caribbean: Cold War Despots
Key texts
- Richard Lee Turits, Foundations of despotism: peasants, the Trujillo regime, and modernity in Dominican history (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003)
- Antoni Kapcia, Cuba in revolution: a history since the fifties (London, Reaktion Books 2010)
Further Reading
- Irving Louis Horowitz and Jaime Suchlicki, Cuban communism: 1959-2003 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003)
- Matthew J. Smith, Red & black in Haiti: radicalism, conflict, and political change, 1934-1957. (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2009)
Seminar 8: The Contemporary Caribbean - Neoliberalism. Tourism, Migration
Key texts
- Amalia L. Cabezas, Economies of desire: sex and tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2009).
- Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer, eds. The modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1990)
Further Reading
- Hillary Beckles: Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide (University of West Indies Press, 2012)
- Nancy Foner, Jamaica Farewell: Jamaican Migrants in London (Berkeley, UC Press, 1978)
- Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, A Tale of Two Cities: Santo Domingo and New York After 1950 (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010)
- Markus Schüller, Humanitarian aftershocks in Haiti (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016)