The Caribbean is often sold to the world as paradise. Turquoise water. Palm trees. Rum. Cruise ships drifting lazily between islands that seem untouched by time. But the truth is far more complicated, and far more important.
The Caribbean did not sit quietly on the edge of history. It helped create the modern world.
Long before skyscrapers rose in New York or London became the financial heart of empire, the Caribbean had already become the great engine room of global capitalism. Sugar, slavery, shipping, migration, piracy, banking, colonial warfare, race, tourism, revolution, migration, music and modern trade routes all collided here first. The region became what historians sometimes call the “American Mediterranean,” a strategic sea linking Europe, Africa and the Americas.
And perhaps nowhere else on Earth reveals the contradictions of modern civilization so clearly.
The Caribbean is beauty layered upon brutality. A place where paradise and suffering have a…
