In the most recent preface, Knight writes that The Caribbean focuses on social and economic factors to tell the story of Caribbean. He moves away from political history and telling the story of national heroes or great men. He also does not focus on specific dates to tell his story.

I only recently became familiar with Franklin Knight’s work, and I was pleasantly surprised by The Caribbean. His writing style was quite enjoyable. He does a great work of incorporating other prominent scholars on the Caribbean and primary source material into his narrative. While Knight covers the entire Caribbean, a hard task, he tends to focus his narrative heavily on the Anglo Caribbean then the Spanish and French Caribbean. The Dutch Caribbean is mentioned from time to time, but it is more neglected in the narrative. Particularly when Knight mentions statistics, he focuses on Anglo-Caribbean.

I did not totally buy into his idea of the two major social groups in chapter four. The separation between Maroon and Pirates as one group, and everyone else as another group seems to neglect the fact that merchants and free people of colour were also transient people in the Atlantic. I did not know that The Bahamas had one of the highest percentages of Free People of Colour in the Atlantic. It was neat to learn.

Knight states multiple times throughout the narrative that settler colonies and exploitative colonies were not always distinct but that sometimes they changed from one form to another or were both simultaneously. I see where Knight is coming from with his distinctions, and I lean on agreeing with him. I think it depends on the majority of the population in the colony. Many White settlers from Europe wanted to create their own micro-metropoles to model the society they left, while other Europeans wanted to extract as much as they could from the land which (usually) meant no modeling after their previous society.

I agreed with Knight’s observation that in British territories “to excel according to the criteria of the mother country’s culture was the ultimate achievement.” You can still see it in the British Caribbean today. When talking about education in the British Caribbean, Knight mentioned the high literary rates. I cannot help but wonder what the rates in the modern-day Caribbean are today. As this book was last updated in 2011, I cannot help but point out that Barbados is also now a republic within the Commonwealth.

Towards the last few pages of the book, Knight mentions the diverse challenges that the Caribbean faces. He points out specifically natural disasters. I believe it is important to note that the region is experiencing a lot of issues due to climate change, such as sea levels rising but also (and something that affects us in Miami) stronger hurricanes. Last hurricane season was ridiculous.

While I was reading, I couldn’t help but think about a number of great books that have come out quite recently that cover some of these countries. Cuba: An American History by Ada Ferrer, Puerto Rico: A National History by Jorell Meléndez-Badillo, and Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution by Marlene L. Daut (She also just published a biography on Henry Christophe).