Far from the romanticised image of the swashbuckling genre of maritime history, the eighteenth-century Caribbean was a ‘marchlands’ in which violence was a way of life and where solidarities were transitory and highly volatile.
This book paints a picture of the eighteenth-century British Caribbean as a frontier zone in which war, international rivalry, disease and slavery are paramount themes. It explores the lure of the region as a vaunted site of potential wealth and derring-do, the fragility of tropical campaigns, the nature of slave insurrection, and the efforts of indigenous peoples (here, the Miskito of the Mosquito Coast and the Black Caribs of St Vincent) to carve out some autonomy from the British and Bourbon powers. It also explores the mutiny of a slave-ship and its unsuccessful raiding ventures in order to show how the dominant European powers sought to contain piracy in an expanding plantation complex. The book emphasizes the contrarieties of struggle, the difficulties preventing subaltern groups, whether slaves, free blacks, indigenous peoples or soldiers and sailors, from forging broader alliances, and the importance of tropical disease in shaping military outcomes. It warns against romanticizing resistance in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, showing that it was instead a ‘marchlands’ in which violence was a way of life and where solidarities were transitory and highly volatile.
Tabella dei contenuti
Introduction
1. Lost in Translation? Tracking Robinson Crusoe Across the Eighteenth Century
2. Vernon’s Nemesis: The Caribbean Expeditions of 1741-42
3. War, Race and Labour in Caribbean Waters, 1740-50
4. Piracy and Slavery Aboard the
Black Prince, 1760-77
5. Rebellion, War and the Jamaican Conspiracy of 1776
6. War, Race and Marginality: The Mosquito Coast in the Eighteenth Century
7. Eighteenth-century Warfare in the Tropics: the Nicaraguan Expedition of 1780
8. The Carbet and the Plantation: The Black Caribs of Saint Vincent
Postscript: The Caribbean Crucible at the Turn of the Century
Appendix: Black Risings, Conspiracies and Marronage, 1773-80
Bibliography
Circa l’autore
NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in History at York University, Toronto and author of Murder on the Middle Passage: The Trial of Captain Kimber (Boydell, 2020) and (with Steve Poole) of Bristol from Below; Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City (Boydell, 2017).
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