Freedom Roots: Histories from the Caribbean

by Laurent Dubois, Richard Lee Turits

To tell the history of the Caribbean is to tell the history of the world," write Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turits. In this powerful and expansive story of the vast archipelago, Dubois and Turits chronicle how the Caribbean has been at the heart of modern contests between slavery and freedom, racism and equality, and empire and independence. From the emergence of racial slavery and European colonialism in the early sixteenth century to U.S. annexations and military occupations in the twentieth, systems of exploitation and imperial control have haunted the region. Yet the Caribbean is also where empires have been overthrown, slavery was first defeated, and the most dramatic revolutions triumphed. Caribbean peoples have never stopped imagining and pursuing new forms of liberty.

Dubois and Turits reveal how the region's most vital transformations have been ignited in the conflicts over competing visions of land. While the powerful sought a Caribbean awash in plantations for the benefit of the few, countless others anchored their quest for freedom in small-farming and counter-plantation economies, at times succeeding against all odds. Caribbean realities to this day are rooted in this long and illuminating history of struggle.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

408 pages, Hardcover

Published December 16, 2019

About the author

Laurent Dubois (PhD. University of Michigan) is associate professor of history at Michigan State University. His book A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 won the American Historical Association Prize in Atlantic History and the John Edwin Fagg Award. He is also the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution, which was a Christian Science Monitor Noteworthy Book of 2004 and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2004, Les esclaves de la République: l'histoire oubliée de la première emancipation, 1787–1794, and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.

http://us.macmillan.com/author/lauren...

Reviews

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

***I was granted an ARC of this via Netgalley from the publisher.***

The history of the Caribbean is rich, complicated and has been marked by interference by outside forces. The book Freedom Roots: Histories of the Caribbean by Laurent Dubois and Richard Lee Turtis explores this. The authors explore the colonial and post-colonial impact on the island. They discuss the importance of land ownership and how important it became to the development of the Caribbean. European and then the USA sought to control and profit from the land and its valuable crops and the clash between the wants of the people and the wants of outside interests determined the history of islands like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. This is a very well written book. It relays its information in an engaging and succinct way. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about Caribbean history.

Rating: 4/5 stars. Would recommend to a friend