Over the last 30 years, the dominant topics in colonial Caribbean historiography have shifted from chronicling the rapid decimation of the indigenous population in the sixteenth century and the rise of “sugar islands” in Barbados, Jamaica, Cuba, and Saint-Domingue to analyzing the Caribbean as a region formed by historical processes that transcended imperial boundaries. Although imperial and national boundaries still shape approaches to Caribbean history, the most innovative and award-winning scholarship by Ada Ferrer, Elena Schneider, and Charlton Yingling engages with archival records in multiple languages in dozens of archives to analyze how porous colonial boundaries influenced everyday experience.
Tessa Murphy's excellent study of the Lesser Antilles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is a welcome addition to this scholarly trend. What makes her approach stand out when compared to scholarship on the Greater Antilles is the ongoing and active presence of indigenous peoples in shaping imperial politics throughout the eighteenth century. Drawing from British and French Archives, Murphy examines in detail how geography, wind currents, and imperial neglect in the Eastern Caribbean provided the environment for a fiercely defended indigenous frontier controlled by the Kalinago to emerge on the islands of Dominica, Grenada, St. Vincent, and St. Lucia. In the seventeenth century, Britain and France recognized Kalinago control of these islands as they concentrated on building plantation colonies on nearby islands such as Barbados and Martinique. The Kalinago's mastery of the canoe and inter-island Caribbean currents served to safeguard their territory even as it attracted runaway slaves, free people of color, and some European settlers. The mix of cultural backgrounds among the indigenous Kalinago, the African population, and mixed-race individuals produced what Murphy insightfully characterizes as a ‘creole archipelago’ in the Eastern Caribbean.
This was neither a runaway slave community separate from European powers nor a planation society modeled on a sugar island. Rather, what emerged as a strategy of survival was a “slave society that contributed to, yet remained just beyond the reach of, European crowns” (79). Murphy's careful analysis of documents shows that what developed on these small islands in the Lesser Antilles was not unlike the dynamics of mainland North American borderlands, which she draws on for scholarly inspiration. As in the Great Lakes region of the United States, overlapping imperial rivalries could hold European conquest temporarily at bay in one region of the Caribbean, while they consolidated their economic and political control in other areas.
Scholars will be delighted to see the main themes of Caribbean history such as imperial colonization, development of slavery, porous cultural boundaries, mestizaje, and global warfare cast on the neglected geographic region of the Eastern Caribbean to chart a rather familiar but still unique story. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the détente that characterized earlier interactions gave way to such conflicts as the Seven Years’ War, the American Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution, which pulled these islands, once considered sovereign or neutral territories, into imperial orbits. The 1763 Treaty of Paris that concluded the Seven Years’ War ended up ceding Tobago, St. Vincent, Dominica, and Grenada to the British, whereas St. Lucia became a French colony. As the plantation economy grew on both those islands and others nearby, more and more settlers arrived in the region. When warfare spilled over from the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions and erupted in the region, the islands were repeatedly occupied and conquered.
In response to the tightening of European colonial control and the rapid decline in the region's autonomy, Murphy provides an excellent analysis of two rebellions in the 1790s. The author explains that although they were undoubtedly part of the movements that crisscrossed the Atlantic, they do not fold so neatly into the broader Age of Revolution that rocked the Caribbean. Fedon's Rebellion in Grenada and the Second Carib War in St. Vincent were part of a much longer struggle that dated back to the seventeenth century, one in which imperial powers attempted to assert colonial rule against a local population that wanted to exercising customary rights.
In summary, Tessa Murphy's book is an excellent addition to a growing Caribbean historiography that crosses imperial, geographic, and national boundaries with an insightful approach that places the indigenous Kalinago population of the Lesser Antilles at the center of this drama.
