Caribbean transformations

by Sidney W. Mintz

Contact and clash, amalgamation and accommodation, resistance and change have marked the history of the Caribbean islands. It is a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create forms of human association through which their pasts and the symbolic interpretation of their present could be structured.

Genres: Anthropology

Hardcover

First published December 31, 1974

About the author

Sidney W. Mintz was Research Professor and William L. Straus, Jr., Professor, Emeritus, in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He was the author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past, among others.

Reviews

[Marilyn Sue Michel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The material is dated (1974; reprint 1989), but sadly, all of the issues continue to be a problem. The genocide of the indigenous tribes; the importation of African slaves; the later importation of Asians and East Indians as low-paid laborers; and the lateral movements from one island to another depending on plantation labor needs. The U.S. history of invasion, intervention, and attempts to impose control has also left its mark. Yet Mintz concludes that the Caribbean islands may end up leading the wave of independent identity which incorporates populations based on something other than the condition one is born into.