The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

Early American Studies

by Tessa Murphy

In The Creole Archipelago , Tessa Murphy traces how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, free and enslaved Africans, and settlers from a variety of European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections that spanned the eastern Caribbean. Focusing on a chain of volcanic islands, each one visible from the next, whose societies developed outside the sphere of European rule until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, Murphy argues that the imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region.

Through use of wide-ranging sources including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy shows how this watery borderland became a center of broader imperial experimentation, contestation, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a creolized society that repeatedly frustrated their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados.

By looking outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes central to understanding early American and Atlantic history, including European usurpation of Indigenous lands, the rise of slavery and plantation production, and the creation and codification of racial difference.

Genres: History

320 pages, Hardcover

Published October 26, 2021

Reviews

[Wv · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book. Uncovers a creole and french side of the windward islands in the Caribbean prior to and post the French and Indian war. Analysis of its impact up until the American Revolution

[Erin]

summer 24 - GSRM

[W M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creole, Kreyol, Criollo all mean being born in the Carribean and of European background at first, but began to take on connotations eventually to include any example of the syncretic culture that began to form. Murphy delivers a wonderful insight into the birth of this modern social and cultural markings unique to the new world. We are introduced to a world at the edge of the imperial periphery where a blending of Language, Race, Religion, and sovereignty created a space through which individual agency can be glimpsed. The larger Atlantic Basin and it’s interconnections are demonstrated as the medium of exchange, while acting as the crucible for the myriad of unique communities along the borders of Caribbean imperial powers.