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 Imperialsim, 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)