West Indies History

In this eye-opening study, Sidney W. Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar and reveals how closely interwoven sugar's origins are as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies, with its use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.

The Haitian Revolution began in 1791 in the French colony of Saint Domingue, when a group of slaves rebelled in order to secure their freedom and the end of slavery. In the midst of the French Revolution, slaves took advantage of volatile political, racial, and social circumstances. With legendary leaders like Toussaint Louverture, they eventually defeated Napoleon’s France to form the independent nation of Haiti. The Haitian Revolution had both global causes and consequences.

The Spanish Conquest: What really happened? If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this audiobook for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener.

“Strikingly dramatic, yet simple and unrestrained . . . an unusual and intensely interesting book richly packed with strange information.” —New York Times Book Review Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather...

In the second half of the 18th century, as European imperial conflicts extended the domain of capitalist agriculture, warring African factions fed their captives to the transatlantic slave trade while masters struggled continuously to keep their restive slaves under the yoke. In this contentious atmosphere, a movement of enslaved West Africans in Jamaica (then called Coromantees) organized to throw off that yoke by violence. Their uprising - which became known as Tacky's Revolt - featured a style of fighting increasingly familiar today....

Winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize Winner of the Longman History Today Trustees’ Award Longlisted for the Orwell Prize Unflinching and revealing, Black and British is a vital history that reveals how black British lives have been woven into the fabric of the nation for centuries – from...

And a Bottle of Rum tells the raucously entertaining story of America as seen through the bottom of a drinking glass. With a chapter for each of 10 cocktails, Wayne Curtis reveals that the homely spirit once distilled from the industrial waste of the exploding sugar trade has managed to infiltrate every stratum of New World society. Curtis takes us from the taverns of the American colonies, to the plundering pirate ships off the coast of Central America, to the watering holes of pre-Castro Cuba, and to the kitsch-laden tiki bars of 1950s America.

In October 1962, when the United States confronted the Soviet Union over its installation of missiles in Cuba, few people shared the behind-the-scenes story as it is told here by the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In this unique account, he describes the hour-by-hour negotiations, with particular attention to the actions and views of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. In a foreword to this edition, the distinguished historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., discusses the book's enduring importance and the significance of new information about the crisis that has come to light from the former Soviet Union.

In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another.

In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the 18th century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the US occupation in 1915.

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart's earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way, binding together ambitious White entrepreneurs and enslaved Black workers in a strangling embrace....

One of the greatest basketball players of all time finally tells—with relentless honesty—the incredible story of his life. He is one of basketball's towering figures: "Mr. Clutch," who mesmerized his opponents and fans. The coach who began the Lakers' resurgence in the 1970s. The general...

For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder. While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic.

Following in the tradition of Richard Wright's Black Boy, Joseph Zobel's semi-autobiographical 1950 novel Black Shack Alley chronicles the coming-of-age of José, a young boy grappling with issues of power and identity in colonial Martinique. As José transitions from childhood to young adulthood and from rural plantations to urban Fort-de-France on a quest for upward mobility, he bears witness to and struggles against the various manifestations of white supremacy, both subtle and overt, that will alter the course of his life.

"My name has become a horror to all those who want slavery," declared Jean‑Jacques Dessalines as he announced the independence of Haiti, the most radical nation‑state during the Age of Revolution and the first country ever to permanently outlaw slavery. Enslaved for the first thirty years of his life, Dessalines (c. 1758-1806) joined the revolution that abolished slavery within the French colony. Then he became a general in the colonial army of the new French Republic. When it was discovered that France once again supported slavery, Dessalines declared war on his former allies.

This audiobook narrated by Tony Chiroldes traces the multifaceted history of Puerto Rico from pre-Columbian times to today.

On January 12, 2010, a major earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the greater part of the capital was demolished. Dr. Paul Farmer, U.N. deputy special envoy to Haiti, who had worked in the country for nearly thirty years treating infectious diseases like tuberculosis and AIDS, and former President Bill Clinton, the U.N. special envoy to Haiti, had just begun to work on an extensive development plan to improve living conditions in Haiti.

Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.

Haiti’s state is near-collapse: armed groups have overrun the country, many government officials have fled after the 2021 assassination of President Moise, refugees desperately set out on boats to reach the US and Latin America, and the economy reels from the after-effects of disasters that destroyed much of Haiti’s infrastructure. How did a nation founded on liberation come to such a precipice? Jake Johnston, researcher and writer at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, reveals how US and European capitalist goals re-enslaved Haiti under the guise of helping it.

Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the umpteen small clues they left for us to unravel, there's no question that they earned their place in history. Pick any Caribbean island and you'll find race, skin color, and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. In A Kick in the Belly, Stella Dadzie follows the evidence and finds women played a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of slave resistance - a role that was not just central, but downright dynamic.