In 1877 a US ornithologist stumbled across a small indigenous Caribbean population, the Caribs, still living in a remote part of the small island of Dominica. His account of his stay among the Caribs started a trickle of visitors which grew to a steady stream and is now in the full flood of mass tourism. Remnants of Conquest offers an account and analysis of these visitors' writings as they struggle to understand the way of life of a twentieth-century indigenous community, inhabitants of a postcolonial world.
Peter Hulme is Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. He is the author of Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 and Remnants of Conquest: The Caribs and Their Visitors, 1877-1998. He is co-editor, with William H. Sherman, of The Tempest and Its Travels and, with Tim Young, of the Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing.