Introduction

Historian Bruce Solnick observed in his study The West Indies and Central America to 1898 that the region has been difficult for analysts to classify. The creature of competing imperialism in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, one area of the modern Caribbean basin owes its heritage to the legacy of the Spanish Empire; other segments were traditionally British preserve; a third area was French, and a final area, more diminutive, was dominated by the Netherlands in the colonial years. It is not surprising, therefore, as Solnick notes, that “often the history of the region is treated solely as a function of European colonial expansion.” ¹ Traditionally, one thinks of the modern Caribbean as the island nations, the descendants of the Spanish, English, French and Dutch Empires: Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Netherlands Antilles (the main ones of which are Aruba and Curaçao), the French départements of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Cayenne, and the main British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados. These areas, as one scholar observes, have had a common historical past rooted in European colonialism and economic dependency, combined with a heavily Afro-Caribbean population. This volume takes a broader approach, including not only those traditional island countries and dependencies but also the Caribbean basin, those nations of Central and northern South America whose shores touch the Caribbean and whose social, economic, political, and diplomatic history have been to a large extent intertwined with the island nations. Hence, the volume touches variously on Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Surinam as well as El Salvador, whose history, although the nation does not border on the Caribbean, has generally intersected with the larger region (Map 1). ² This is not to suggest that there is a unity to the basin; rather it tends to be a geopolitical entity; nonetheless, especially in the course of the twentieth century as U.S. hegemony displaced the older European colonialism, and the Caribbean became an American lake, that U.S. hegemony in itself has provided a unity to the area. At the same time, one must be cautious not to exaggerate the impact of the United States culturally, politically, and economically or to ignore the significant and lingering legacy of both Europe and Africa in the Caribbean basin. Significant as well have been the intra-regional developments, from efforts to achieve federations and common trade blocs on the positive side to the history of human migrations and conflict on another side. ³ Contemporary Caribbean basin https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315003474/d180d822-376a-49d9-9ac3-6540fdf06f8c/content/figI_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>