Empire's Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day - Rilegato

Gibson, Carrie

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0802126146 ISBN 13: 9780802126146

Casa editrice: Atlantic Monthly Pr, 2014

Riassunto

Ever since Christopher Columbus stepped off the Santa Maria onto what is today San Salvador, in the Bahamas, and announced that he had arrived in the Orient, the Caribbean has been a stage for projected fantasies and competition between world powers. InEmpire’s Crossroads, British American historian Carrie Gibson traces the story of this coveted area from the northern rim of South America up to Cuba, and from discovery through colonialism to today, offering a vivid, panoramic view of this complex region and its rich, important history.

After that fateful landing in 1492, the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, and even the Swedes, Scots, and Germans sought their fortunes in the islands for the next two centuries. Some failed spectacularly: a poorly executed settlement in Panama led the Scots to lose their own independence to England. The Spaniards were the first to find prosperity, in Mexico but also along the islands. In Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, they built grandiose cathedrals and extracted shipfuls of gold and silver, which English, French, and Dutch pirates were happy to seize. But precious metals weren’t a sustainable exportthe colonizers needed something that was, and they would need hordes of slaves to cultivate it.

The Caribbean’s first cash crop, one indigenous to the New World, was tobacco, and it, along with sugar, spurred expensive new addictions back in Europe. Gibson argues that immaterial exports were just as important. No other region of the world has experienced such a vibrant mixing of cultures, religions, and peoplesAfricans, Europeans, Asians, and Amerindians created amazingly dynamic Creole societies that complicated traditional ideas about class and race. By the end of the eighteenth century, seventy thousand free blacks and mulattos lived in the British islands alone, and it was in the Caribbean that the world’s only successful slave revolt took placesparking the meteoric rise of Napoleon’s black counterpart, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and the Haitian Revolution.

The Caribbean island of St. Eustatius had been the first to recognize the United States as a nation, but the Americans were soon vying for their own imperial stronghold in the West Indies, attempting to control Cuba and backing influential corporations, most notably United Fruit. In the twentieth century, most of the islands broke from the imperial traditions that had lorded over them for four centuries: this would be the explosive age of decolonization and banana republics,” of racial riots and négritude, of Cold War politics and tourist crowds.

At every step of her expansive story, Gibson wields fascinating detail to combat the myths that have romanticized this region as one of uniform white sand beaches where the palm trees always sway. Evocatively written and featuring a whole cast of cosmopolitan characters, Empire’s Crossroads reinterprets five centuries of history that have been underappreciated for far too long.

Su questo libro

Recensione

An Observer (UK) Best History Book of the Year
A Hudson Booksellers' Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

Gibson knows how to hold a reader’s interest with gems of fact and sometimes poetic prose.”
New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice”

Carrie Gibson has written a judicious, readable and extremely well-informed account of a part of the world whose history is seldom acknowledged. Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; she takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.”
Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars and King Leopold’s Ghost

Ambitious. . . . With rare narrative verve and a gift for synthesis, Gibson compresses the islands’ histories into a wide-ranging, vivid narrative.”
Observer (UK), Best History Books of 2014”

A rich and thorough history of the Caribbean from colonialism to the present day . . . Carrie Gibson’s thoughtful and extensively researched Empire’s Crossroads is a revelation. It is both a readable and in-depth study . . . a valuable work that is required reading for scholars and students . . . impassioned and anecdotally rich.”
Christian Science Monitor

Gibson’s social history focuses heavily on the destructive legacy of slavery, the bitter divisiveness of racism, and the brutality and inequalities of the opulent sugar plantations that dominated Caribbean economies for 300 years . . . Gibson tells [the story] in fluid, colorful prose peppered with telling anecdotes.”
Foreign Affairs

Required reading for everyone with a fascination for the Caribbean; recommended for all who wish to acquire one.”
Peter Chapman, author of Bananas: How the United Fruit Company Shaped the World

A marvelously rich and inclusive panorama of five centuries of Caribbean history. . . . A work that brings fresh energy, assurance and insight to an area that is not often the focus of historians. Gibson’s study is sure to gratify academics, history buffs, and anyone intrigued by the Caribbean’s colorful, volatile, and multifaceted societies.”
Library Journal (starred review)

Gibson synthesizes and integrates some of the most important insights from recent historical scholarship on slavery, capitalism, and empire into an accessible survey of over five centuries of Caribbean history. The Cambridge-educated author combines the careful reflexivity and nuance of a seasoned historian with the verbal dexterity and attention to current events of an accomplished journalist, producing a book that is both readable and thought provoking, regionally specific and globally aware, historical yet exceedingly relevant to today’s most pressing issues. . . . An excellent introduction to Caribbean history for non-specialists.”
Choice

Gibson manages to weave 500 years of complex history into a brilliantly coherent and thematic narrative. . . . [A] strikingly assured debut.”
Observer (UK)

[An] epic history of the Caribbean . . . vivid and thought-provoking.”
Spectator (UK)

Who knew that King James (the Bible one) was one of history’s first anti-smoking activists? Who could have guessed in advance that tourist promoters would turn a desolate isle in Haiti, the hemisphere’s poorest nation, into paradise’ behind a chain link fence? In Empire’s Crossroads, Carrie Gibson shows how seemingly isolated anecdotes, in the right hands, can be used to form a mosaic that shows us the meaning of history.”
T.D. Allman, author of Finding Florida

Carrie Gibson asks not just how Europe shaped the Caribbean, but how the islands in turn shaped Europe and the rest of the world. Her approach is fresh and important. Empire’s Crossroads skillfully shows the complexity of the Caribbean and its striking ability to adapt to and push back against the forces that have shaped the region.”
Michele Wucker, author of Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola

A panoramic view of this complex region and its rich history.”
Publishers Weekly

An ambitious work bringing together fragmented histories of more than 20 different islands across an area of 3,000 miles . . . bolstered by her travel experiences in St. Martin, Trinidad, Guyana and other places.”
Kirkus Reviews

With such variegated histories, the islands of the Caribbean would seem to defy a unified treatment, yet Gibson identifies themes common to large ones, such as Hispaniola, and small ones, such as Montserrat. . . . Sympathetically attuned to the hard actualities of life in ostensibly paradisiacal tropics, Gibson delivers a fine, faceted history for general-interest readers.”
Booklist

[A] sharp, gripping new overview of the region’s history. . . . Empire’s Crossroads is a great read about some fantastically absorbing and to many people, little-known history. . . . An exceptionally impressive debut.”
Literary Review (UK)

Carrie Gibson has written a compelling history of the Caribbean, rightly placing it at the heart of European imperialism. This is a gripping account by a gifted scholar and story-teller.”
Tristram Hunt, British Shadow Secretary of State for Education and author of Marx’s General, The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels

There can never be too many books about the Caribbean, a region whose diversity and cultural richness is unparalleled, and Carrie Gibson’s new offering is a welcome addition to the canon.”
BBC History (UK)

L'autore

Carrie Gibson completed a Ph.D. at Cambridge University focusing on the Spanish Caribbean in the era of the Haitian Revolution, and for many years she also worked as a journalist for theGuardian. She has travelled widely across the West Indies, and spent many months researching in archives there, including in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. She currently splits her time between New York City and London.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Atlantic Monthly Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0802126146
• ISBN 13: 9780802126146
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 448