Lecture, Session 2
European Discovery of the Caribbean
In 1492 the natives of the Caribbean discovered the entrepreneur-explorer Christopher Columbus and his men strolling along their beaches. Columbus thought he was going to Asia. His “Asian mistake” unleashed extraordinary, profound consequences for four continents: North America, South America, Europe and Africa. Within two centuries (by 1700), Columbus and his men had led a successful genocide of aboriginal Arawak, Carib and Ciboney peoples of the Antilles. The Europeans conquered the Antilles with ease, as if they were open lands. They completely eliminated the indigenous people, leaving behind a society full of immigrants. It was multiracial, multilingual, and socially stratified. The Antilles, having been purged of its Amerindian natives, was now populated by Africans who crossed Atlantic in chains. Over 10 million were transported, making up the largest migration of human beings in history. The African captives and their Afro-Creole descendants worked on totally modern plantations, which stood as the first agricultural factories with a complex division of labor.
Mintz warns us to avoid imagining the Caribbean as backward, pre-modern societies. Their rural, agrarian structures might make them appear non-western or primitive, but they are utterly western, part of historical western processes of conquest, colonization and capitalist economies. Their labor served to consolidate metropolitan capital, and helped launch the first “planetary empires.” Secondly, their labor helped to incorporate a European working class, which made products that aided transformation of European agricultural labor from a peasantry into wage-laboring masses (another kind of servitude). Their products were: sugar, cacao, tobacco, rum, coffee, spices.
Consider how diet/food consumption can be a means of control.
Mintz writes that coffee, sugar, tobacco were effective in placating
factory workers of Britain and France--minimizing their public
outrage. The point of these benefits was to keep them working and
acquiescent with empty calories (such as caffeine and alcohol).
The Caribbean (and the Americas) thus linked Europe and Africa in a
triangular system, which created the world’s first “planetary
empire.” In the 16th century, the world system or world economy
emerged with division of labor composed of
core and periphery and
semi-periphery areas, known as the Atlantic
system. The core areas competed on a global scale for
top position (Spain, France, Holland, England, U.S.). They
produced finished products and had the political
structure of autonomous nation states. At the
periphery, the economy was dominated by raw
commodities for export. Their political structure was weak, and
their politics and economics were identified with and characterized by
totalitarian-type regimes. There was little "freedom," and a
prevalence of labor relations like slavery or serfdom. Keep in
mind, there were links between these two areas
(semi-periphery). The growth of the European
society and economy can be inextricably linked to the conquest and
development of the Caribbean and Americas.
Today in the Caribbean, there are 15 independent nations and 12 colonies. Officially, "the Caribbean" designates the thousands of islands arching southeast from Florida, along the Caribbean Sea to the northern coastline of South America. Also included are Belize in Central America and Guyana, Suriname and Cayenne on Northern/Northeastern coast of South America. The Greater Antilles make up the larger, northern islands: (Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Island of Hispanola), while the Lesser Antilles is comprised of a double chain of islands between Puerto Rico and Trinidad.
Map of Caribbean. Image courtesy of the United States' Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook. Click to Enlarge.
Terrain and Climate
The ground mainly consists of limestone, with granite and coral. Unfortunately, this is ideally suited to an expanding agro-capitalist order. Disappointed by the dearth of bullion-gold, silver was found as another source of extractive profits. Some islands, and parts of many others, are ruggedly mountainous, inhospitable. Ayiti means "mountain." A few of the islands are flat (Barbados, Antigua). Larger islands have fertile inter-mountain valleys and hills high enough to support coffee and cacao cultivations. Coastal plains are suitable for sugar cane, industrial fibers, and cattle raising. Cuba is the largest island (equal to half of the other islands), though it is smaller than the state of Ohio. Generally-speaking, there are fertile soils, year-round harvests, and great natural beauty. However, there are numerous physical hazards as well. Among these, the most lethal are hurricanes and flooding. Such occurrences can have such powerful impacts on daily Haitian life that many citizens date past events by great destructive hurricanes. This is an example of a non-commodified concept of time (qualitative rather than quantitative).
Aboriginal Peoples
Before the arrival of Europeans, the Greater Antilles were mainly occupied by Taino Arawaks. They were settled peoples of a complex hierarchy, structured into caciques (chiefdoms). They exhibited residential patterns from small villages to towns of several thousand. They used slash and burn agriculture (mainly manioc, potatoes, beans, arrowroot, and peanuts). A smaller, aboriginal group (the Ciboney) were mainly hunters and gatherers, and were generally dominated by Arawaks and Caribs. Ciboney caught the brunt of Spanish power (and sickness), and were exterminated or absorbed into the Creole population within a half century. Though it is impossible to know how many died, some estimate between 750,000 and 1 million were murdered.
The Lesser Antilles were dominated by the Caribs. They were agriculturalists and fisher people, usually occupying smaller settlements. According to Franklin Knight (The Caribbean), they were more aggressive than Arawaks, whom they invaded frequently. The Carib populations in the Eastern Caribbean survived longer--even until the 18th century.
