HISTORY28 - West Indies

This article is the history of West Indies (sometimes called the Caribbean Islands), including a discussion of the natural landscape, the pre-Columbian period, European exploration and colonization, the West Indies since the 1790s, and the West Indies today.  

My primary source for this article was “West Indies” - Britannica Online Encyclopedia, supplemented by numerous other online sources.

Map of West Indies, 1810.

Natural Landscape

The West Indies are a crescent-shaped group of over 7,000 islands and islets, stretching over 2,000 miles from the Florida peninsula south-southeast to the northern coast of Venezuela.  These islands include active volcanoes, low-lying atolls, raised limestone islands, and large fragments of continental crust containing tall mountains and rivers.  The total land area of the West Indies is 106,300 square miles.  The highest point in the West Indies is Rico Duarte peak in the Dominican Republic at 9,843 feet. 

Three major physical geography divisions constitute the West Indies:  

a.    Greater Antilles, comprising the four largest West Indies islands:  Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico.

b.  Lesser Antilles, including the Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Saint Martin, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Barbuda, Antigua, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Barbados, and Grenada.

c.   Isolated island groups of the North American continental shelf - The Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands; and those of the South American shelf, including Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire, Trinidad, and Tobago.

The West Indies lie between 11-27 degrees north latitude.

  

The West Indies, positioned between 11-27 degrees north latitude, have a tropical maritime climate. Daily maximum temperatures over most of the region range from the mid-80s F from December to April to the upper 80s F from May to November.  Nighttime temperatures are about 10 degrees F cooler. Most islands experience a wet and a dry season; annual rainfall totals range from 30 to 80 inches, but reach more than 200 inches on the highest peaks. The region’s moisture-laden easterly trade winds produce heavy rainfall on the windward sides of the higher islands.  Hurricanes frequently occur between August and October, and relative humidity is high throughout the year.

The forests that once covered most of the West Indies were cut down in many areas by sugar-plantation owners for firewood to heat their refining vats. Destruction of primeval forest has also occurred as a result of slash-and-burn agriculture.  Surviving types of forest include mangrove swamps, which thrive along some coasts; semi-deciduous woodland, found in the northern group of the Lesser Antilles, and other areas of prolonged drought; tropical rainforest of the wet lowlands; forest occurring in wet highlands; and stunted woodland, which occurs on exposed peaks.

The Caribbean region is noted for its diverse and varied vegetation. Flowers thrive in the moist, tropical environment found on many islands. Hibiscus, bougainvillea, and orchids are just a few of the varieties found there. The Caribbean Sea is home to a wide array of marine plant life, including corals, seagrass and algae.

There are many rodents, including the rabbit like agouti, and numerous species of bats and lizards. Bird species include several parrots, hummingbirds, ibis, and flamingos. The coastal seas are rich in marine life, including turtles, shellfish, caiman, dolphin, red snapper, bonito, and flying fish.

Pre-Columbian Period

Before Columbus arrived in the West Indies in 1492, pre-Columbian peoples there had evolved important and distinctive cultures.

The first people to arrive in the West Indies were the Paleo-Indians (5000-2000 BC), who were hunter-gatherers on the littorals of Cuba, Hispaniola, and Trinidad, and who originated in Central or South America. The Meso-Indians (1000–500 BC) were also hunter-gatherers but with a more sophisticated material culture - that of pottery and tool making - and spread from South America to Trinidad and the Greater Antilles. These Meso-Indians, called the Ciboney in the Greater Antilles, were concentrated in the western parts of what are now Cuba and Haiti. The third group to inhabit the region were the Neo-Indians: the Taino, an Arawakan-speaking people, who entered Trinidad from South America about 300 BC and spread rapidly to the Lesser and Greater Antilles, and then the Carib, who migrated after AD 1000 from the Orinoco River delta region in what is now Venezuela.  The Carib lived mostly in northern Trinidad and the Lesser Antilles, where they displaced the Taino.

Taino groups in the Greater Antilles shared a common lifestyle, group of languages, and social organization.  Their social structure was stratified and dominated by hereditary rulers who may have had matrilineal lines of inheritance, and shamans who presided over the Taino’s complex religious activity. The Taino settled in villages that were established inland in forest clearings, and each village had its own chief. Houses with circular ground plans, timber walls, and palm thatch roofs were arranged around a central open space.  Villages were particularly plentiful in Hispaniola and usually had populations between 1,000 and 2,000.  Dancing and ball games were popular forms of recreation.

Throughout the Greater Antilles, Taino groups also exhibited a uniform development in technology and techniques of subsistence. They fished, hunted, collected wild plants, cultivated kitchen gardens, and developed a system of crop rotation for growing starch- and sugar-rich foods.  They also used fibers in the manufacture of canoes, gold ornaments, and pottery.

Carib villages in the Lesser Antilles usually were located on the windward coasts, and were protected from surprise attack.  Their social relationships were probably more flexible than those of the Taino, and they had no hereditary leaders.  Many similarities, however, existed between the Carib and Taino cultures, especially with regard to crop cultivation. While Carib pottery was inferior to that of the Taino, Carib canoes and woven cloth were superior.  The houses of the Carib, constructed of pole frames covered with palm thatch, were oval or rectangular.

Historians have estimated that the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the West Indies numbered approximately six million in 1492.

 

Distribution of Caribbean, Central American, and northern Andean cultures, c. 1492.

 

European Exploration and Colonization (1492-1800)

Spanish Discovery and Colonialism.  Spanish control of the West Indies began in 1492 with Christopher Columbus’s first landings in the New World on a small island in The Bahamas (probably San Salvador), Cuba, and Hispaniola.

Christopher Columbus was the first European to explore the West Indies.

 

Columbus’s journey kicked off centuries of exploration and exploitation on the American continents. The so-called Columbian Exchange transferred people, animals, food, and disease across cultures. Old World wheat became an Americas food staple. African coffee and Asian sugar cane became cash crops for Latin America, while American foods like corn, tomatoes and potatoes were introduced into European diets. It is estimated that by the early 1600s, 90 percent of the pre-Columbian indigenous population in the Americas had died from European diseases for which the natives had no immunity.

With Columbus’s arrival, “the Caribbean Sea was transformed into a Spanish lake.” Settlement by the Spanish concentrated on the Greater Antilles and above all on the densely populated island of Hispaniola, where the first permanent Spanish settlement in the Americas was established at Santo Domingo in 1498.

Spanish prospecting for precious metals in the West Indies led only to modest discoveries, but Santo Domingo rapidly became the “mother of settlements” in Latin America; the momentous expeditions to Mexico under Hernán Cortés (1519-1521) and to Peru under Francisco Pizarro (1524-1532) began from there. Their success diverted Spanish attention to the mainland in the 1520s, and Santo Domingo was soon superseded in significance by Havana (Cuba), founded in 1519, and San Juan (Puerto Rico), founded in 1509, which provided staging posts for the fleets of galleons transporting cargoes of bullion from the “Spanish Main” (the mainland bordering the Caribbean) to the Iberian Peninsula.

The intervention in 1542 of Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casas to prevent the genocide of the native population came too late to save the Taino, although it did accelerate the introduction of enslaved Africans that had started in the early 16th century to replace the vanishing natives - a solution to the Spaniards’ labor problem that Las Casas had suggested.

 

Spanish missionary Bartolome de Las Casas forcefully argued against the genocide of indigenous peoples, but suggested that resulting manpower shortages be satisfied with African slaves.

Small sugar industries were set up on a plantation basis in Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and in the Virgin Islands, but they remained of minor significance and died out at the end of the 16th century.

Havana and San Juan continued to play a crucial part in trade between Latin America and Spain until the latter lost its mainland empire as a result of independence struggles of the 1820s in Mexico, Central America, and South America.

Other European Colonialism.  By the early-17^th century, other northwestern European powers (England, France, Netherlands, and Denmark) began to challenge Spain in the West Indies, mostly concentrating in the Lesser Antilles, which were poorly defended by the Spanish and essentially under Carib control. 

England was the most successful of European predators on the Spanish possessions.  In 1623, the English occupied part of Saint Kitts, and in 1625, they occupied Barbados.

In the 1640s, Sephardic Jews, who were operating successful sugar plantations in Brazil, were pushed out of northeastern Brazil by the Portuguese, and relocated to British-controlled Barbados.  They brought with them new techniques and technology to turn sugar cane into molasses, used in the production of rum, helping to make Barbados the sugar capital of the Caribbean and the rum capital of the world.

 

Slaves cutting sugarcane on the Caribbean island of Antigua, 1832.

By 1655, when Jamaica was captured from a small Spanish garrison, English colonies had been established in Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat.  

France occupied the rest of Saint Kitts, took control of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635, and in 1697 formally annexed the western third of Hispaniola (Haiti), which for about half a century had been occupied by buccaneers and French settlers. 

From the late 1620s to the late 1680s, buccaneers, or pirates, attacked Spanish shipping in the vicinity of the windward passage between Cuba and Hispaniola.  Based first in northern Hispaniola, then on the small island of Tortuga, off the northwest coast of Hispaniola, the buccaneers, encouraged by rival European powers, became strong enough to attack Spanish mainland settlements in today’s Panama and Guatemala.   The buccaneers were finally suppressed in the late 1680s.

Curacao, Aruba, and Bonaire, off the coast of present-day Venezuela, and Saba, and half of Saint Martin, in the northern group of the Lesser Antilles, became Dutch possessions in the 1630s, but more as part of the military strategy of the Dutch war of independence against Spain than in expectation of agricultural riches.

Between 1672-1718, Denmark established colonies on three small islands in the Virgin Islands:  Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix - in order to participate in the sugar plantation business.

The French and the British continued to dispute possessions in the Lesser Antilles throughout the 18th century, and by the early 19th century, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Tobago, and Grenada were in British hands, while Trinidad was formally ceded to Britain by Spain in 1802, following its capture in 1797.

Plantation Slavery.  During the second half of the 17th century, colonialism in the West Indies was linked to sugar and coffee plantations using slave labor imported from West Africa.  

In the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1525-1866), 12.5 million West Africans were shipped to the New World.  Of them, 1.8 million died during the Atlantic passage from inhumane treatment and disease.  Of the 10.7 million slaves that survived to reach the Americas, the majority were taken to South America.  Around 35 per cent of the slaves, about 4.4 million people, were taken to the West Indies.

The plantations and slavery created a hierarchical society based upon racial distinctions and law. During the 17th century the upper strata of West Indian society were Europeans and their white descendants - who were generally free, though some were indentured workers serving a period of contract labor, and enslaved black Africans.

By the 18th century, interbreeding among the races had become more prevalent.  Many children of mixed ethnicity obtained their freedom, creating an intermediate stratum of free “people of color” (persons of mixed ethnicity and freed black slaves of African descent).  By law and by custom, however, only whites enjoyed full civil rights; the free mixed-race and black populations suffered many legal disabilities.  Slaves - who included many mixed-race persons by about 1800 - were nonpersons, chattels to be bought and sold.

West Indies since 1790s

Emancipation. In the 1790s and early 1800s, West Indian societies were shaken by a successful slave rebellion in the French Colony in today’s Haiti, which led to a growing independence movement. The movement resulted in Haiti’s independence in 1804, thus creating the first republic founded by people of primarily African descent in the Americas.

 

Painting depicting one of the last battles (1803) of the slave rebellion in Haiti.

 

In 1807, Britain abolished the slave trade, and slavery itself was abolished in the British West Indies by 1838.  The French enacted emancipation in 1848 and the Dutch in 1863.  But while these changes were taking place in the British, French, and Dutch West Indies, Spanish Cuba was developing as a slave-plantation producer of sugar.  The importation of enslaved Africans into Cuba, despite a British naval blockade, turned the island into a predominantly black and mixed-race society by the second half of the 19th century.  Full emancipation was not enacted in Cuba until 1886, 13 years after it was accomplished in Puerto Rico, where tobacco was more important than sugar and where enslaved people made up less than five percent of the population.  Subsequent free white immigration, especially for plantation work in the early 20th century, once again transformed Cuba into a mainly white society with a Hispanic culture.

Emancipated slaves were free to sell their labor, migrate, squat, or purchase land. A “reconstituted” peasantry emerged in Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the norther Antilles islands.  In some of the islands, ex-slaves were unable to acquire plantation land; mountainous (nonplantation) land was all that was available to former slaves.  Thus, on islands with plantation land, freed slaves there remained as plantation workers or emigrated and moved to Central America or the United States.  Cuba’s emancipated blacks were soon caught up in the war of independence with Spain; their descendants were later drawn into the burgeoning sugar industry developed by U.S. capital, much as mixed-race peasants had been in the Dominican Republic and as whites would be in Puerto Rico.

The persistence of the plantation system and of white elitism, bolstered by colonialism, shored up the structure of the grossly unequal societies of the West Indies after emancipation.  Excepting the French West Indies from the late 19th century - democracy was systematically denied. The complexity of the social hierarchy of blacks, whites, and people of mixed ethnicity was compounded on some islands by the arrival of other ethnic groups. New minorities were produced by Chinese indentured immigration to Cuba; South Asian indentured immigration to Trinidad, and to a lesser extent to Jamaica, Martinique, and Guadeloupe; and free movement of Chinese, Portuguese, Syrians, and Lebanese to Trinidad and the Greater Antilles (mainly in the 20th century).

Decolonization.  Radical change in the social position of nonwhites depended less upon emancipation of slaves than on decolonization. Having liberated themselves in 1804, the Haitians in the early 1820s invaded Santo Domingo and incorporated the former, almost forgotten Spanish colony, into a Hispaniola-wide Haiti. In 1844, Dominicans rejected Haitian hegemony and declared their sovereignty.  The third independence from a European power in the West Indies was Cuba’s, in 1898, and it involved not only two wars of independence with Spain, but also U.S. intervention (the Spanish-American War). Cuba achieved formal independence from the United States in 1902, but remained under the dominance of the U.S. until 1934. (See below.)

Most of the West Indian societies were decolonized with imperial consent after World War II - by a grant of full independence, as in the case of most of the British territories, or by incorporation into the mother country, as in French-affiliated islands of the Lesser Antilles, or through their association with the colonial power, as in the former Netherlands Antilles and some of the British territories.

When World War II ended in 1945, only three West Indian states were independent - Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba - and all either were, or about to become, dictatorships.  When the British, the French, and the Dutch began to decolonize, a major concern was the establishment of democracy.

Between 1962-1983, the UK granted independence to 10 West Indies countries and retained five islands as dependencies.  France retained four dependencies among the Lesser Antilles.  And the Netherlands retained six dependencies, three in the northern Lesser Antilles, and three off the northern coast of Venezuela.

Dependencies.  Even after decolonization, dependence remained the hallmark of Caribbean economies. For decades, the terms of trade, for example, have operated against West Indian primary producers; none of the West Indian islands produced enough of any one major commodity to have a decisive role in fixing prices.  More damaging in many cases than the terms of trade was the penetration of each island economy by foreign enterprise.  Neocolonialism (practice of using economics, globalization, cultural imperialism, and conditional aid to influence a developing country) instead prevailed in most islands, and West Indians were acutely aware of their dependence on overseas capital, decision makers, and technologies, particularly in the French-affiliated islands of the Lesser Antilles.  (See details below)

The importance of multinational corporations in West Indian economies was reflected in the preeminent position of North American companies in the Jamaican, Haitian, and Dominican Republican bauxite industries and (to a lesser extent by the early 21st century) in Trinidad’s petroleum economy; the role of British-based companies in West Indian sugar production and refining; and the monopolistic position of both British and North American companies in the marketing of bananas from Jamaica and the southern Antilles Islands.

Decolonization delivered different results in different countries.   Haiti was plagued with oppression and impoverishment for 30 years of rule by François Duvalier and Jean-Claude Duvalier, and the severe political and economic instability that followed in their wake.

Cuba saw significant economic development, but also political corruption and a succession of despotic leaders, culminating in the overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista by Fidel Castro during the 1953-59 Cuban Revolution. The new government aligned with the Soviet Union and embraced communism. Massive quantities of advanced Soviet military hardware, including batteries of surface-to-air missiles, flowed to the island, and in October 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred.  With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the subsidies disappeared, and Cuba was plunged into a severe economic crisis. The country has gradually gained access to foreign commerce and travel. Domestic economic reforms are also beginning to modernize Cuba's socialist economy.

British, French, and Dutch former colonies have made considerable social and economic progress under generally democratic governments. Indeed, the process of democratization - one of the major goals of decolonization - has largely been successful.  

In 1857, the U.S. annexed tiny Navassa Island from Haiti, located 46 miles southwest of Haiti, for its guano-mining potential.  Over the years, the island has been used for guano mining, a lighthouse, and a WWII observation post.  The island remains a U.S. unincorporated territory, now a wildlife refuge, and is uninhabited.

In 1898, following the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, which remains an unincorporated territorial possession.  Its future political status remains the subject of debate among islanders; some groups continue to pursue statehood and others independence.

In 1917, the United States purchased Denmark’s three small islands in the Virgin Islands:  Saint Thomas, Saint John, and Saint Croix, and renamed them the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Between 1898 and 1983, the United States often intervened militarily in the West Indies, including in Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Granada - “to oppose external powers intervening in the Caribbean and to protect the economic interests and safety of American citizens in these countries.”  These interventions are summarized in the table below.

 

U.S. Military Interventions in the West Indies.

West Indies Today

Today, the West Indies include 13 independent countries and 18 dependencies, as shown in the tables below.  The Gross Domestic Product is based on purchasing power parity, GDP(PPP), that takes into account the relative costs of local goods, services, and inflation rates. 

Independent countries in the West Indies today (alphabetical order).

West Indies dependencies today (alphabetical order).

 

The total population of the West Indies is about 43,200,000, largely the legacy of the early plantation society based on slave labor.  Most of the population is descended from African slaves or from Spanish, French, British, or Dutch colonists, or is of mixed ethnicity.  Over 17 million Caribbean people can trace their full or partial ancestry to West Africa, with the greatest percentage of black ethnicity in Haiti (95%) and Jamaica (92%).

Apart from a small number of Caribs in Dominica and a few scattered populations of partial Indian heritage in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Saint Vincent, and Trinidad, the pre-Columbian islands indigenous population completely disappeared under the impact of conquest, slavery, and diseases introduced by the Europeans.

Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion in the Spanish- and French-speaking islands, while Protestantism is the norm in the English-speaking and Dutch territories.

With the exception of Cuba, which has a centrally planned economy, the West Indies can be characterized as a predominantly free-enterprise market, but the economies depend on the export of a few commodities, commonly agricultural, and consequently are extremely vulnerable to external economic events.   Most countries are not self-sufficient in food production, and cereals, primarily wheat, are the chief food imports.  Sugar, bananas, citrus, cocoa, and spices are the principal exports. 

The per capita gross national product (GNP) of West Indies countries ranged in the early 21st century from less than $400 in Haiti (well below the world average) to more than $22,000 in Cuba (comparable to the per capita GNP of many western European countries) and more than $24,000 in the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

Manufacturing in the West Indies accounts for a minor part of overall economic activity. Several countries, including Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago, have developed significant mineral industries, with the chief mineral exports being bauxite from Jamaica and petroleum from Trinidad.

Among the dependent states, foreign subsidies and remittances provide a major source of income. 

The governmental forms of the independent states of the West Indies range from the socialist republic of Cuba to republics such as Dominica and the Dominican Republic and to constitutional monarchies such as Jamaica and Saint Lucia. 

Educational systems are generally well developed, and the great majority of countries have literacy rates exceeding 80 percent. Higher education is available at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of the West Indies, which has campuses and distance-education centers in more than a dozen countries in the region.

In spite of their diversity in ancestry and language, the countries of the West Indies share a largely common culture, the result of their somewhat parallel experiences as plantation colonies. The culture of the Caribbean people is a blend of African, indigenous, European, and, in some cases, Asian influences. The islands take pride in their lively cultural scenes, with dances, parties, and festivals, notably annual carnival celebrations. Reggae music, now world-renowned, originated in Jamaica.

Tourism in the West Indies thrives largely thanks to the region's picture-postcard beaches and balmy weather. Abounding in natural treasures that range from lush tropical rainforests to cactus scrublands to coral reefs and extensive sea grass meadows, the region's scenic landscapes attract eco-tourists.  The color palette of all things in West Indies - from geography and architecture to food on the plate - is bright, cheerful, and vibrant thanks to multicultural fusion.  Action-oriented vacationers can engage in all kinds of water sports, hiking, cycling, and horseback riding, while the rest can lay back and relax to the beats of Reggae music.