杏吧论坛

Dr Timo McGregor

This course is available on the BA in History, BA in Social Anthropology, BSc in History and Politics, BSc in International Relations and History, BSc in Politics and History and BSc in Social Anthropology. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course is available to General Course students.

The Caribbean, while geographically small, has played a major role in global history. Over the course of five-hundred-years the Caribbean has been at the centre of clashes and encounters between indigenous peoples, Europeans, Africans, and Asians all of which has led to momentous political, social, economic and cultural change.  Far from simply being a tropical tourist paradise or tax haven, the Caribbean is widely recognised as a key site of modernity through the role the region has played in global historical processes of exploration, colonialism, transatlantic slavery, capitalism, revolution, wars, migrations and diasporas. Critical movements have emerged from the Caribbean ranging from pan-Africanism, Garveyism, Rastafarianism, and multiculturalism all of which impacted Africa, Asia, the United States, Europe and Latin America. The Caribbean has spawned foundational writers, artists, and intellectuals like José Martí, C L R James, Una Marson, Eric Williams, Nicolás Guillén, Sam Selvon, Jean Price-Mars, Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, Fidel Castro, Claudia Jones, Walter Rodney, Bob Marley, Jamaica Kincaid, to name just a few who have provided critical commentary on the region and its links to the wider world.

This course presents an overview of Caribbean political, social and cultural history from the height of transatlantic slavery to the late twentieth century. It especially focuses on the three central themes of American and European colonialism, race and revolution and takes an expansive view of the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanic Caribbean. Wherever possible, comparisons and contrasts with Europe, the United States and Latin America are drawn upon. Weekly topics that will be explored in lectures and classes include: European Colonial Encounters; transatlantic slavery and the making of ‘race’; the structure of slave societies: plantations and Maroons; the Haitian Revolution; abolition, apprenticeship and emancipation in the British and French Caribbean; Asian Indentureship and the contin