The dawn of the third millennium saw prophets of doom foretelling the end of civilization. Central to this climate of fear was the willful destruction of the environment and, more precisely, the harm caused by climate change. In the Caribbean, such fears were confirmed by rising temperatures, the increased intensity of extreme weather events, the devastation of coral reefs, species extinctions, the virulence of viral diseases, and rising sea levels. Globally, nineteen of the hottest years ever recorded occurred in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century. The oceans were at their warmest in 2019, and global greenhouse gas emissions hit a record high. These alarming indicators of environmental deterioration had far-reaching ramifications in politics, economy, and society. Indeed, the challenges faced by the Caribbean in the first twenty years of the twenty-first century occurred in the context of a changing global geopolitical climate that affected most aspects of life, from health and material welfare to identity, sovereignty, and culture. For the Caribbean, the home of the hurricane, a perfect storm was brewing.

Enslaved people never accepted their lot. They found themselves trapped, often for generations, unable to see a way out, but given half a chance, they grasped the opportunity to escape and live in freedom. For numerous reasons, the decades after 1770 offered many more opportunities than had come before. Wherever they could, enslaved people seized these opportunities – to rebel and revolt – and to a striking degree they proved successful. These were the decades labelled by modern historians the ‘age of democratic revolution’, associated at first with the period 1760–1800 but later broadened to encompass the hundred years 1750–1850 and simplified to an ‘age of revolution’. The key events of the period initially were identified as the American Revolution and the French Revolution, but the revolution in St Domingue demands an equal place in this narrative. Similarly, the struggle for political liberty in Spanish America and the struggle for the abolition of slavery constitute vital elements of the age of revolution.

The Caribbean is named for its sea, but the islands define the region and make its history. As a marine environment, the Caribbean Sea is a creation of the land that encloses it, with a continental coastline to the south and west, and a permeable but continuous arc of islands facing the Atlantic Ocean. Without the islands there would be no sea. The water would be nothing more than another stretch in the fluid maritime history of the ocean. Equally significant, the islands of the Caribbean surround and demarcate the sea rather than sitting in it. This geographical formation determined fundamental features in the development of the Caribbean and distinguished the experience of the region from that of other island histories around the world.

Unlike the original peopling of the Caribbean islands, which came late in the human settlement of the Americas, it was in these islands that the secondary – Columbian – colonization of the continents had its beginning. This was not the only significant difference between the two colonizations. The secondary phase, which reached the islands in 1492 with Columbus, did not have roots in the tropical rimland, as did the first colonization, but rather had its origins far away across the Atlantic, in Europe. It brought in its wake peoples, plants, animals, and technologies not only from Europe but from across the globe – particularly Africa, but also from the world beyond the Atlantic, from Asia and the Pacific. Further, whereas the first colonization peopled the islands, the initial impact of the secondary wave was characterized not by an augmentation of island populations but their destruction.

By the beginning of the seventeenth century, European colonization had reduced the Caribbean islands to a blank canvas. In truth it was not so much a blank canvas as one that had been thickly painted by a series of hands, scoured and scraped, then smeared with a rough bloody cloth, and cleaned again of yet another attempted landscape. The people and the civilizations that had flourished in the Greater Antilles before Columbus had been virtually obliterated. They had not been replaced by any new substantial population or any new form of civilization. Even regions the Spanish had attempted to populate were being evacuated. The land that had been brought to a high state of cultivation by the Taínos was being reconquered by rainforest. Exotic trees made themselves at home in the woodland. Large feral animals introduced by the Spanish crashed through the undergrowth of this landscape, otherwise silent but for the night sounds of crickets and frogs, the occasional noisy cascade or crack of thunder. Only in the smaller islands of the eastern Caribbean, which the Spanish had touched less heavily, did the indigenous people survive in significant numbers.

People came late to the Caribbean islands – late in terms of the broad sweep of human history, and late in the peopling of the Americas. The islands of the Caribbean remained uninhabited longer than almost any other of the world’s major resource-rich regions. Even when the process of colonization began, it proceeded in fits and starts and took thousands of years to complete. Some islands remained uninhabited long after their neighbours had been populated and are still uninhabited because they lack the resources to be viable. Why were the islands colonized so late, and why, once commenced, was the process so protracted and erratic? Looked at another way, the more difficult question may be why people chose to live on islands at all. Why leave behind the immense resources of the continents in order to live in small places surrounded by saltwater?

For the people of the Caribbean, World War II proved both an interruption and a catalyst. It meant blockades and shortages, and delays in dealing with social problems, and it tested loyalties to empires and imperial masters. It also exposed islanders to the challenges of self-sufficiency and, for those who joined the battle abroad, provided insights into the character of life and death in the imperial homelands and the intense racism that existed even within the fight for freedom and equality. The experience fuelled both a desire for political and human rights and a desire to live in a better place.

If the middle decades of the nineteenth century saw the Caribbean becoming relatively sufficient unto itself – turning away from traditional genetic and trade links that had tied the region to an Atlantic world but more specifically Africa and Europe – the decades after 1870 were marked by the growth of a much more clearly defined North American orientation. This new connection had three main sources. First, the United States replaced the European nations as the hegemonic imperial power in the region. Second, the Caribbean developed increasingly strong economic links with the United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada in terms of trade, capital flows, and investment. Third, it was in the period after 1870 that, for the first time, Caribbean people began to migrate out of the region in large numbers. Most common among the destinations of these new emigrants was the United States and its outliers. This newfound orientation towards North America laid the foundations for longer-term challenges to understandings of identity, nationality, and allegiance.