The Creole Archipelago : race and borders in the colonial Caribbean
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The Creole Archipelago : race and borders in the colonial Caribbean
（Early American studies）
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2021
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Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Islands Beyond Empires
Chapter 1. Kalinago Dominion and the Shape of the Eastern Caribbean
Chapter 2. Creating the Creole Archipelago
Chapter 3. Colonizing the Caribbean Frontier
Chapter 4. Seeking a Place as Colonial Subjects
Chapter 5. Surviving the Turn to Sugar
Chapter 6. An Empire Disordered
Chapter 7. Revolutions and the End of Accommodation
Conclusion. Echoes of the Creole Archipelago
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"
