The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century, by L.H.?Roper (ed.)

摘要

As a collection of essays, The Torrid Zone is a stellar example of what AtlanticHistory has the potential to be. The 12 essays weave together a story of multiple overlapping empires and a vast array of people all contesting, negotiating,and struggling to survive in the early Caribbean. The editor, L.H. Roper, intendsit to be a history of “the ‘long’ seventeenth-century Caribbean in an organic,transnational, holistic way” (p. 3); the Caribbean, in this book, encompasses notjust the islands but surrounding stretches of mainland that were connected tothe Caribbean world in North and South America, “from Carolina to Cayenne”(p. 3). In these sophisticated and original essays, we see the impact of distantEuropean politics on the Caribbean; we see people moving across the boundaries of empire and shifting their identities and allegiances. We see the violence, coercion, and destruction of the early Caribbean, but also the extent towhich it was a place of possibility and creative cultural hybridization.