We should consider studying Caribbean History from an environmental and global perspective because the region is just part of a whole, and only as such could we make better sense of it. Should a student attempt to study a relatively “short” history, say about 500 years, of any given region without first firmly being acquainted with the histo ry of the world, such student will invariably develop a terribly incomplete and unclearview of that region’s past.
This is so because neither history happens nor it is understood in a vacuum. The Caribbean owes its existence, its names and its history to what happened before “written history” (prior to 1400s) and to what happened around the world afterward as much as what happened in the Caribbean itself. In other words, it is part of a milieu (context); what environmentalists would call a “historical ecosystem.”
When the word “Caribbean” is invoked, images of sugar, slavery, pirates, and tourism would come to most people’s minds. But, even while these terms fail miserably to encompass the wholeness of the region, either past or present, they are in every sense the product of global forces interacting in the region. So, the specific makes sense solely within the broad, and the general only adds up with the particular.
Sugar became the foremost cash-crop in the Caribbean not because people there wanted to consume excesses of it. In fact, it had little to do with the wishes of the locals and lots with the intentions of the colonial masters. Even though the sugar cane was first cultivated in India many centuries ago the Europeans found it most convenient to plant it in their nearest tropics to satiate their growing sweet addiction. Indeed, a scandalously close look at the production of sugar in the Caribbean reveals the foreignness of its industry, and yet, its impact in the region is literally immeasurable.
Enslaved Africans too arrived in the Caribbean by and large as a result of Europeans’ commercial convenience. They were neither looking forward to the “middle-passage” as a recreational trip nor were they happy at the sight of the islands’ shorelines. European merchants, instead of creating slaving plantations in Africa, where well-armed natives firmly controlled the land, found it easier to ship slaves to the Caribbean, which they controlled (against the Native Americans’ will, of course).
It is true that pirates in the Caribbean were named Buccaneers because they learned to cook meat from locals. This in itself may flaunt them as the personification of Caribbeanness. Then again, they were actually foreign- born who had come to the region with a foreign requisition on behalf of a global task. Yes, they turned up in the Caribbean chiefly to help destroy the mighty Spanish Empire at its weakest spot. And since they had been, as a rule, disinherited individuals in Europe they had no better place
to make a name for themselves. Therefore, in a twist of irony, European social and imperial histories would certainly help understand pirates in the Caribbean.
Similarly, tourism in the Caribbean has become the most important industry in the region, but not because the people there are innately servile and had nothing better to do. It has been, instead, in large measure because the unstoppable economic forces from the industrialized world. Their push has help determined these places as the most suitable for “first-world” countries’ overworked middle-class to once a year let off steam. So, the extremely popular Caribbean tourism owes its success to its pristine beaches as much as it does to the economics shaping the labor history of the industrialized West.
Perhaps no influence on the Caribbean has been more significant than simply its natural milieu and the way humans have related to it, in other words, its geography and environment. The powerful and dry trade winds, which initially seek out the arctic flowing from the South Atlantic, are soon thrust toward the Caribbean islands by the blustery weather of the Sahara Desert streaming west. The sandy currents pierce the Caribbean archipelago from the bottom to enter the Mexican Gulf where it heats even more. It then exits warm and gasping for the North Atlantic, squirting through the Florida Straits at 2-5 knots. At this speed it squeezes out from between the coast of Florida and the island of the Bahamas, as an uncontainable monster, swiping first through the Havana harbor, and producing one of the world’s greatest ocean currents, namely, the Gulf Stream.
This powerful stream, which has for many centuries warmed the otherwise cold Europe, had also pushed back frustrated European sailors from reaching the Americas. No wonder lost fishermen and daring sailors prior to 1492 never returned. It took a brainy yet holy fool like Christopher Columbus to find out about the foyer which the Saharan breeze unlocks a few hundred miles south of Europe. As he suspected it, after reaching the Canary Islands the wind flowing west irremediably drove Columbus four times towards the Caribbean islands.
It must have felt like a modern highway in a Ferrari. But for those attempting an entrance through the north, it was not until the 1600s, when the European navigational technology could face against the challenge of the ocean winds that Europeans would attempt to cross the North Atlantic. It was then, more than a century after Columbus, that northern Europeans began colonizing the American northern hemisphere—what today is the United States and Canada. So, the Caribbean opened up the European experiment in the Americas thanks, but no thanks, to its environment and the way people related to it.
And now, I will make perhaps a controversial argument. Global History as it is commonly presented in popular university courses is already obsolete. This is so neither because the traditional White men of history are irrelevant, nor because women and other ethnicities are not being included in the global narrative. They are, sometimes. Instead, it is because the more we learn about science and nature the more we learn about how human history is ultimately shaped by the interaction with the environment. Up to just recently, history courses overlooked this cardinal point. We should attempt to correct the flaw by addressing the subject of global natural history from the outset.
As important as world history, the history of the Caribbean is also vital to understand the histories of the Atlantic, North America, Africa, Europe and Latin America. These groups of islands and the continental shores that embrace these waters have been enormously influential in most historical developments concerning the four continents around the Atlantic Ocean. The people who have inhabited the Caribbean have been affected and have affected profoundly the events in Latin America, North American, Europe and Africa. So, the study of Caribbean History would help us learn more about ourselves and others in reference to global history as well as to the present.
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