Prologue: Rethinking Regions in Colonial British America -- Chapter One. Plundering and Planting the Greater Caribbean -- The Greater Caribbean -- Native Peoples and Native Societies -- Early English Incursions : Privateering and the Tobacco Trade -- Colonization of the Leeward Islands and Barbados -- Chapter Two. The Sweet Negotiation of Sugar -- Tobacco and Cotton Societies -- "This King of Sweets" -- The Rise of Slavery -- Leeward Island Transitions -- Chapter Three. Jamaica -- Jamaica and the Western Design -- Planting, Plunder, and Trade -- "A Constant Mine" -- Chapter Four. "Carolina in ye West Indies" -- The Colony of a Colony -- The Rice Revolution -- The Greater Lowcountry -- Chapter Five. "In Miserable Slavery" -- The Slave Trade -- The World of Work -- The Reaper's Garden -- Family Life, Culture, and Religion -- Resistance and Rebellion -- Chapter Six. Creole Societies -- Social Divisions -- Life in a Region of Death -- Women and Family Life -- Social and Cultural Life -- Chapter Seven. Trade, Politics, and War in the Eighteenth Century -- "A Grand Marine Empire" -- Local and Imperial Politics -- Warfare -- Eighteenth Century Conflicts -- The Treaty of Paris -- Epilogue: The Political Crises of 1760s -- Essay on Sources.
Summary:
"In Hubs of Empire, Matthew Mulcahy argues that it is useful to view Barbados, Jamaica, and the British Leeward Islands, along with the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, as a single region. Separated by thousands of miles of ocean but united by shared history and economic interest, these territories formed the Greater Caribbean. Although the Greater Caribbean does not loom large in the historical imaginations of many Americans, it was the wealthy center of Britain's Atlantic economy. Large-scale plantation slavery first emerged in Barbados, then spread throughout the sugar islands and the southeastern mainland colonies, allowing planters to acquire fortunes and influence unmatched elsewhere--including the tobacco colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Hubs of Empire begins in the sixteenth century by providing readers with a broad overview of Native American life in the region and early pirate and privateer incursions. Mulcahy examines the development of settler colonies during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, explores diverse groups of European colonists, and surveys political, economic, and military issues in the decades before the Seven Years War. The plantation system achieved its fullest and harshest manifestation in the Greater Caribbean. The number of slaves and the scale of the slave trade meant that enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans in all of the affiliated colonies, often by enormous ratios. This enabled Africans to maintain more of their traditions, practices, and languages than in other parts of British America, resulting in distinct, creole cultures. This volume is an ideal introduction to the complex and fascinating history of colonies too often neglected in standard textbook accounts"-- Provided by publisher. "The colonial Low Country (the Carolinas, Georgia) and British Caribbean made up an integrated region quite distinct from the Chesapeake, Mid-Atlantic, or New England. Like Maryland and Virginia, the greater Southeast--which formed, as Mulcahy argues, a dynamic center of the British imperial scheme in the New World--relied on staple crops and slave labor. Yet the economic and social ties that bound the Carolinas and the West Indies created quite distinct cultures, black and white alike, giving planters, e.g., a sense of taste and behavior far more tropical and Continental than the ideals that influenced tobacco planters in the Chesapeake. The location and trade patterns of the Carolinas and West Indies encouraged the purchase of slaves from sources and in numbers that ensured far greater persistence of African traditions (and threats of violence) than elsewhere. Mulcahy offers us a short book that explores this early-American/Caribbean region in the manner of our other series titles--explaining the integrity if not unity of the region and what made it so and also comparing it to other economic/cultural regions in the colonial period"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.