More languages
More actions
| Caribbean | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Largest city | Santo Domingo |
| Area | |
• Total | 2,754,000 km² |
| Population | |
• 2026 estimate | 44,778,065 |
Caribbean is the collective geographical name for the archipelagos and island groups of the Atlantic Ocean situated between North and South America. The region encompasses the Greater Antilles, the four largest islands of Cuba, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, which bound the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Lesser Antilles, subdivided into the Virgin Islands (east of the Greater Antilles), the Windward Islands (bordering the Caribbean Sea to the east), and the Leeward Islands (lying off the north coast of South America). The Bahamas, located in the northwestern Atlantic, are also conventionally included within the broader Caribbean region.[1]
Within the British imperial system, the Windward Islands and Leeward Islands were administered as two separate colonial groupings, each encompassing a defined portion of the Lesser Antilles. The Caribbean's geographic position astride the passage between the Atlantic and the approaches to the Pacific via the Panama isthmus, and between the two American continents has historically given it exceptional strategic importance, making it a site of intense imperial rivalry and, later, of overwhelming US military presence in the form of naval bases, air installations, submarine anchorages, and fuel stations established across both colonial territories and formally independent states alike.[1]
The region also possesses favorable natural conditions for tropical agriculture. These two characteristics, strategic location and agricultural wealth made the Caribbean one of the earliest and most brutally exploited regions of European colonization.[1]
History[edit | edit source]
At the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 during which he famously mistook Cuba for a peninsula of East Asia, the islands of the Caribbean were inhabited by a variety of indigenous peoples. The Arawak-speaking peoples of the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Hispaniola were organized into associations of tribes led by hereditary caciques (chieftains), while the Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles and parts of Hispaniola were governed by elected caciques who also served as military leaders. The economy of these societies combined agriculture with fishing.[1]
Spanish colonization brought catastrophic consequences for the indigenous population. Through direct extermination, slavery on sugar plantations, and exploitation in the mines, the indigenous Caribbean peoples were annihilated within decades of European contact. The resulting acute labor shortage drove the Spanish colonizers to begin importing enslaved Africans to the Caribbean, a trade that would define the region's social and economic structure for the next two centuries.[1]
The mass importation of enslaved Africans intensified dramatically in the seventeenth century with the expansion of plantation agriculture above all sugarcane, but also tobacco and cotton. Alongside this development, the declining power of Spain opened the region to challenge from other European powers. English, French, and Dutch privateers operated throughout the Caribbean from the late sixteenth century onward, acting as instruments of rival imperial ambitions.[1]
From the early seventeenth century, Britain systematically seized and colonized Caribbean islands: St. Kitts in 1623, Barbados in 1627, Antigua in 1632, Tobago, and others through the 1680s. Jamaica fell to the British in 1655, and the Bahamas in the early eighteenth century. French colonization proceeded simultaneously and, after conflict with Spain and Britain, resulted in French control of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and the western portion of Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue, the future Haiti). The Dutch established themselves on Aruba, Curaçao, Bonaire, Saba, and the southern half of Saint Martin. Denmark acquired St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, the Danish West Indies. By the early eighteenth century, Spain retained direct control only of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the eastern portion of Hispaniola.[1]
The brutal exploitation of plantation slavery generated constant resistance. Slave revolts were a permanent feature of Caribbean colonial life. The most consequential eruption came at the end of the eighteenth century in Saint-Domingue, where an uprising of enslaved Blacks and free people of color in 1791 grew into a full-scale War of Independence between 1791 to 1804, culminating in the proclamation of Haiti, the first Black republic in history and the first nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery through armed revolution. The Haitian Revolution sent shockwaves through every slaveholding state in the Americas.[1]
The crisis of the slave plantation economy, sharpened by repeated revolts, eventually forced the formal abolition of slavery across the British Caribbean in 1834 with a period of "apprenticeship" extending to 1838 and subsequently in the French and Dutch colonies. In practice, the freed slaves were bound to the plantations by debt, lack of land, and legal coercion, slavery persisted.[1]
Throughout the nineteenth century, British influence in the Caribbean was dominant. In the latter decades of the century, however, the United States as its domestic market consolidated, its industrial capitalism expanding, began an aggressive drive for regional hegemony. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine and the ideology of Pan-Americanism as diplomatic cover for expansionism, Washington moved to displace European rivals and subject the Caribbean to direct American control and occupation.[1]
This push reached a qualitative turning point with the Spanish-American War of 1898, being the first imperialist war for the redivision of the world. As a result of that war, Puerto Rico was seized as a US colonial possession. Cuba, which had waged an independence struggle against Spain, was formally declared an independent republic, but was in practice reduced to a semi-colony: the Platt Amendment granted the United States a formal "right" of military intervention, and a strategically critical naval base was imposed on Cuban soil at Guantánamo Bay. The US intervened repeatedly, occupying Cuba between 1898 to 1902, 1906 to 1909, 1912, and 1917 to 22.[1]
In 1903, the United States orchestrated the separation of Panama from Colombia using naval power to guarantee the success of a coup engineered by US agents and seized the Panama Canal Zone, establishing permanent dominance over the inter-oceanic passage. President Theodore Roosevelt made the logic explicit in his "big stick" doctrine, by which American imperialism claimed the right to intervene militarily throughout Latin America and the Caribbean at will. This was complemented by "dollar diplomacy", the systematic use of US financial power to reduce Caribbean and Central American states to economic vassals of American banks and corporations.[1]
The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 dramatically elevated the Caribbean's military-strategic importance to US imperialism, and the pace of intervention accelerated accordingly.[1]
In 1915, the United States invaded and occupied Haiti, effectively converting it into a colony under military administration. Armed uprisings against the occupation broke out in 1918 and 1929 to 30 and were suppressed with great brutality by US forces. American troops withdrew in 1934, though Washington maintained undisguised economic and political control. The Dominican Republic was similarly occupied in 1916 and placed under an American military governor, and though US forces formally withdrew in 1924, the country remained a de facto American protectorate, with the US subsequently backing the Trujillo dictatorship. In 1917, the United States purchased St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix from Denmark for $25 million, completing its territorial consolidation of the Virgin Islands.[1]
The global economic crisis of 1929 to 33, which fell with crushing weight on Caribbean workers and peasants, triggered a new wave of revolutionary and labor unrest throughout the region. The influence of the Russian Revolution of 1917 had already left its mark: a Communist Party was founded in Cuba in 1925, and fraternal parties emerged in other Caribbean territories in the years following. This rising mass movement compelled American imperialism to repackage its policies. Under President Franklin Roosevelt, Washington proclaimed a "Good Neighbor" policy, abandoning the formal right of direct military intervention while intensifying the economic subjugation of the region and sharpening the struggle to displace British imperial interests.[1]
The Anglo-American rivalry for Caribbean dominance was effectively resolved by World War II. An agreement concluded in 1940 gave the United States 99-year leases on British territories, including the Bahamas, Jamaica, St. Lucia, Trinidad, and Antigua for the construction of naval and air bases, in exchange for the transfer of fifty destroyers which were worthless to Britain.[1]