History of the Caribbean

The exploitation of the labor of Indigenous peoples and the demographic collapse of that population, forced migration of enslaved Africans, immigration of Europeans, Chinese, South Asians, and others, and rivalry amongst world powers since the sixteenth century have given Caribbean history an impact disproportionate to its size.

At the beginning of the current geological epoch, the Holocene era, the northern part of South America was occupied by groups of small-game hunters, fishers, and foragers.

[2] It was not until about 7000/6000 BCE, during the early Holocene that Trinidad became an island rather than part of the mainland due to a significant jump in sea level by about 60 m., which may be attributable to climate change.

The conclusion is that Trinidad was the only Caribbean Island that could have been colonized by Indigenous people from the South American mainland by not traversing hundreds or thousands of kilometers of the open sea.

[7] The ensuing Archaic age is often defined by specialized subsistence adaptions, combining hunting, fishing, collecting and the managing of wild food plants.

[14] Following the colonization of Trinidad, it was originally proposed that Saladoid groups island-hopped their way to Puerto Rico, but current research tends to move away from this stepping-stone model[15] in favor of the southward route hypothesis.

[22] According to National Geographic, "Among the surprising findings is that most of the Caribbean’s original inhabitants may have been wiped out by South American newcomers a thousand years before the Spanish invasion that began in 1492.

The Spanish encounter with lands and peoples unknown to them before the 1492 began with the first voyage of Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus, sailing under license from Queen Isabel I of Castile.

Although Spain claimed the entire Caribbean and concluded the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) with Portugal that divided the world between the two monarchies, Spaniards settled only the larger islands of Hispaniola (now the Dominican Republic and Haiti) (1493), where they founded the permanent settlement of Santo Domingo.

The Spanish later founded settlements on Martinica (1502); Puerto Rico (1508); Jamaica (1509); Cuba (1511); and Trinidad (1530), and the small 'pearl islands' of Cubagua and Margarita off the Venezuelan coast because of their valuable pearl beds, which were worked extensively between 1508 and 1530.

To supplement and then replace the dwindling indigenous labor force, the Spanish transported enslaved Africans to the Caribbean to work on plantations cultivating cane sugar, a high-value export product.

For European powers without colonies in the Americas, the islands presented possibilities for commercial development of sugar plantations on the model established by the Spanish, using enslaved African laborers.

Giovanni da Verrazzano (aka Jean Florin) led the first recorded French corsair attack against Spanish vessels carrying treasures from the New World.

In 1523, off the Cape of St. Vincent, Portugal, his vessels captured two Spanish ships laden with a fabulous treasure consisting of 70,000 ducats worth of gold, large quantities of silver and pearls, and 25,000 pounds of sugar, a much-treasured commodity at the time.

In the mid-1530s, corsairs, some Catholic but most of them Protestant (Huguenot), began routinely attacking Spanish vessels and raiding Caribbean ports and coastal towns; the most coveted were Santo Domingo, Havana, Santiago, and San Germán.

Corsair port raids in Cuba and elsewhere in the region usually followed the rescate (ransom) model, whereby the aggressors seized villages and cities, kidnapped local residents, and demanded payment for their release.

Whether ransoms were paid or not, corsairs looted and frequently committed acts of violence against their victims, desecrated churches and holy images, and left smoldering reminders of their incursions.

English piracy increased during the reign of Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1625–1649) and became more aggressive as Anglo-Spanish relations further deteriorated during the Thirty Years' War.

The first instances of English mercantile piracy took place in 1562–63, when Hawkins’ men raided a Portuguese vessel off the coast of Sierra Leone, captured the 300 slaves on board, and smuggled them into Santo Domingo in exchange for sugar, hides, and precious woods.

He lost almost all of his ships and three-fourths of his men were killed by Spanish soldiers at San Juan de Ulúa, off the coast of Veracruz, the point of departure of the fleet of New Spain.

[34] Many of the battles of the Anglo-Spanish war were fought in the Caribbean, not by regular English forces but rather by privateers whom Queen Elizabeth had licensed to carry out attacks on Spanish vessels and ports.

[38] "Slaves frequently reacted strongly to enforced severance of their emotional bonds",[38] feeling "sorrow and despair",[38] sometimes, according to Thomas Cooper in 1820, resulting in death from distress.

The spread of the plantations and European settlement often meant the end of many Maroon communities, although they survived on Saint Vincent and Dominica, and in the more remote mountainous areas of Jamaica, Hispaniola, Martinique and Cuba.

This they found initially in China and then in India; the plantation owners subsequently crafted a new legal system of forced labor, which in many ways resembled enslavement.

The following former British Caribbean island colonies achieved independence in their own right; Jamaica (1962), Trinidad and Tobago (1962), Barbados (1966), Bahamas (1973), Grenada (1974), Dominica (1978), St. Lucia (1979), St. Vincent (1979), Antigua and Barbuda (1981), St. Kitts and Nevis (1983).

In a key addition to this policy called the Roosevelt Corollary, the United States reserved the right to intervene in any nation of the Western Hemisphere it determined to be engaged in "chronic wrongdoing".

The US invaded and occupied Hispaniola (present day Dominican Republic and Haiti) for 19 years (1915–34), subsequently dominating the Haitian economy through aid and loan repayments.

[59] President Lyndon Johnson had ordered the invasion to stem what he claimed to be a "Communist threat", but the mission appeared ambiguous and was condemned throughout the hemisphere as a return to gunboat diplomacy.

Post-independence economic needs, particularly in the aftermath of the end of preferential agricultural trade ties with Europe, led to a boom in the development of the tourism industry in the 1980s and thereafter.

These treaties leave the enforcement of labour, tax, health and safety, and environmental laws under the control of the registry, or "flag" country, which in practical terms means that such regulations seldom result in penalties against the merchant ship.