WEST INDIES, HISTORY OF

history of the islands from the pre-Columbian period to the present. Hispanic control of the West Indies began in 1492 with Christopher Columbus' first landing in the New World and was followed by the partitioning of the region by the Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Danish during the 17th and 18th centuries. U.S. intervention in the Greater Antilles started in the early 19th century and culminated in the occupation of Cuba and annexation of Puerto Rico in 1898 and the purchase of the Danish Virgin Islands in 1917. Hence, each unit's connectionspolitical, economic, and culturalhave been forged almost exclusively with the countries of western Europe or the United States. Soviet collaboration with Cuba after Fidel Castro's revolution in 1959 perpetuated the history of great-power involvement in the West Indies. Before the colonization of the West Indies, however, pre-Columbian peoples there had evolved important and distinctive cultures. Additional reading Many histories of the region explore slavery and its origins and consequences: Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean, 16241690 (1972); Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 16241713 (1972); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 16231775 (1974); B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 18071834 (1984); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (1982); William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 18301865 (1976); Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman (eds.), Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (1985); R.W. Beachey, The British West Indies Sugar Industry in the Late 19th Century (1957, reprinted 1978); and Malcolm Cross and Gad Heuman (eds.), Labour in the Caribbean: From Emancipation to Independence (1988). The rise of the post-emancipation peasantry is explored in Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (1974, reissued 1984); Gordon K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies (1968), is a general history. A path-breaking work relating to dependency is Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (1944, reissued 1983); economic dependency on foreign countries is developed in Anthony Payne and Paul Sutton (eds.), Dependency Under Challenge: The Political Economy of the Commonwealth Caribbean (1984). The history of political and ideological conflict in the contemporary West Indies is told in Anthony Payne, The International Crisis in the Caribbean (1984); Paul Sutton, Dual Legacies in the Contemporary Caribbean: Continuing Aspects of British and French Dominion (1986); Robert D. Crassweller, The Caribbean Community: Changing Societies and U.S. Policy (1972); and Virginia R. Domnguez and Jorge I. Domnguez, The Caribbean, Its Implications for the United States (1981). The land Relief, drainage, and soils The West Indian archipelago stretches for more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres) from Cuba almost to the north coast of South America. This island chain, divided principally into the Greater and Lesser Antilles, separates the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean. Other islands of the region are isolated groups on the continental fringe of the Antilles, including The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Netherlands Antilles. (Bermuda, although sometimes discussed with the region, is not physically related to the other islands.) The shape and alignment of the Greater AntillesCuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico (to which the Virgin Islands are structurally related)are determined by an ancient chain of folded and faulted mountains that in Cretaceous times extended from Central America through the Caribbean. Remnants of this system occur in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica and in the Sierra de los rganos and the Sierra Maestra in Cuba. Duarte Peak in the Dominican Republic, another component of this range, rises to some 10,400 feet (3,170 metres) and is the highest point in the Caribbean. Each Greater Antillean island has an encircling coastal plain, backed on the north coast of Cuba, Jamaica, and Hispaniola by Pleistocene-raised shorelines that reach heights of 1,000 feet. Structural depressions separate the original mountain ranges from interior valleys, notably in the Enriquillo basin in the Dominican Republic, which is below sea level, and in the Cayman Trench between Cuba and Jamaica, where the depth exceeds 25,200 feet, the deepest point in the Caribbean Sea. The Caribbean is a physically volatile zone characterized by frequent seismic disturbances, some of them disastrous, as the devastating Jamaican earthquakes at Port Royal (1692) and Kingston (1907) and the eruption of Mount Pele on Martinique will recall. The Lesser Antilles begin east and south of the Virgin Islands and are composed of a double arc of small islands. (For practical purposes the Virgin Islands are included in this discussion of the Lesser Antilles.) Stretching from Saint Kitts to Grenada, the mountainous inner arc consists of volcanic cones, some still active. The outer arcrunning from Anguilla to Barbadosis made up of low, flat islands, whose limestone surface overlies older volcanic or crystalline rocks. The Lesser Antilles are also often divided into a Leeward (northern) group and a Windward (southern) group. On the continental fringes of the Greater and Lesser Antilles are located The Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and numerous islands off the Venezuelan coast, including the southern Netherlands Antilles. The Bahamas are flat patches of porous limestone and coral; coral reefs also fringe many of the Greater Antilles. Trinidad's Northern Range is a continuation of the Andean system, as are the planated (flattened) islands north of Venezuela, but the southern plains of Trinidad are formed from deposition from the Orinoco River in Venezuela. The drainage of the West Indies is characterized by short rivers, whose steep mountain courses, often across crystalline rocks, give way to sluggish channels on the coastal plains. The extensive dry season, which causes some of these rivers to dry up for part of the year, is notably intense on the southern, leeward coasts of the Greater Antilles. Irrigation must be used or deep wells dug in some of the drier areas. Also in the Greater Antilles the extensive limestone outcrops have given rise to a tropical karst landscape, which is characterized by the porosity of the rock and systems of underground drainage; the condition has created rounded, conical, or elongated hummocks (knolls) separated by depressions. Topography and geology have been crucial to soil formation in the West Indies. In the mountains, especially in the Greater Antilles, the original forest cover supplied a high organic content to the surface layer. But deforestation has led to erosion and to the exposure of an infertile mountain soil, especially in Haiti and Jamaica. Soils of the limestone areas fall into two groups: terra rossa is a red bauxitic soil with substantial organic matter; rendzina suffers impeded drainage. Lowland soils occur on the coastal plains and in interior basins; they are the most fertile soils and, together with the volcanic soils of the Lesser Antilles, have been cultivated in sugarcane for more than 300 years, in many instances without loss of quality. Climate Most of the West Indies lies within the tropical zone astride the track of the northeast trade winds. The tropical maritime climate exhibits no summer or winter but rather a change from a wet to a somewhat drier season. Temperatures remain fairly constant throughout the year. At weather stations anywhere in the small islands and near the coasts of the larger ones, temperatures vary within a mean daily range of 10 to 15 F (6 to 8 C), fluctuating between the low 70s and mid-80s F (low 20s and upper 20s C) from December to April and between the mid-70s and upper 80s F from May to November. Inland in the Greater Antilles the cooling influence of the sea, and the sea breeze, is lost. Frost is unusual, even in the highest mountains, and extreme low temperatures rarely drop below 55 F (13 C). Relative humidity is high throughout the year, usually ranging between 65 and 85 percent. Differences in size, shape, topography, and location in relation to the northeast trade winds influence the amount and seasonality of rainfall. Many stations in the Greater Antilles and Leeward Islands record 40 to 65 inches (1,016 to 1,651 millimetres) per year, with more than 200 inches (5,000 millimetres) on the highest peaks. There is, however, a marked rain-shadow effect on the Greater Antilles' southern coasts, which are distinctly arid, and Saint Martin and Anguilla have salt ponds and water cisterns. The entire Windward group is well watered; but to the south the rainfall diminishes, and Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles (Bonaire and Curaao) at the southwestern extreme are desertic. Bonaire has one short wet season; Trinidad and Dominica have one wet and one dry season; the Greater Antilles have two wet and two dry seasons. Climatic influences originating outside the West Indies bring extreme conditions. Cold fronts extend south from the North American high-pressure anticyclone system from December to April, but these winds, which produce a sudden drop in temperature, overcast skies, and light rain, seldom blow south of Antigua. Severe tropical storms originating over the Atlantic occasionally become hurricanes. Skirting north of Trinidad and Tobago (although these have been hit occasionally), they usually sweep through the Lesser Antilles before swinging west across the Greater Antilles. Hurricanes are a source of great concern because of the damage they cause to houses, crops, animals, and human life, and the economy of a hard-hit island can require a year or more to recover. The people Ethnic composition The numbers of white and black West Indians are about equal, and only a slightly smaller percentage is mulatto, who form a distinct colour category. Many West Indian countries have large black majorities, but whites account for some 70 percent of the population of Cuba and Puerto Rico, which between them have more than 40 percent of the total West Indian population. Elsewhere, except for the Dominican Republic, where mulattoes form about three-fourths of the population, and some small dependencies, blacks are the largest single element but not necessarily the majority. Haiti and Jamaica have the largest numbers of black population. Race, colour, culture, ethnicity, and class are intertwined in complex ways in Caribbean societies, but they may be categorized into four different social types: (1) folk societies that are characteristic of small (less than 20,000 population) islands or combinations of islands, lacking class stratification and ethnic diversity, and containing one or more colour groupings, (2) stratified societies that exist where there is a close association between colour, class, and culture, as in Jamaica, Haiti, and the Windward and Leeward Islands, all of which were slave societies in the 17th and 18th centuries, (3) societies in which race salience is of prime importance, as in Trinidad and Tobago, where the black, brown, and white stratification has been confronted by a large, segmented East Indian population, and (4) class-stratified societies that have nonblack majoritiessuch as predominantly white Cuba and Puerto Rico and the predominantly mulatto Dominican Republic, which developed as sugar producers in the 19th century and where blacks and black culture are now confined largely to enclaves in the stratification. Linguistic composition The West Indies are linguistically diverse. In addition to the languages of the colonial powersEnglish, Spanish, French, and Dutchthere are a number of tongues spoken by non-European immigrantsHindi, Urdu, and Chinese. Also, there are pidgin variants of the European languages known as creoles, which have become the common languages of many of the people. English and French creoles are the most widespread and are best developed in Jamaica and Haiti, respectively. Spanish creoles did not evolve in the major Spanish-language communitiesCuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. A variant called Papiamento, a Spanish-Dutch-Portuguese-English creole, is widely spoken in Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles. There is a marked correlation between whiteness and the use of standard language forms, though with a distinctive Caribbean accent, and blackness and creole usage: the association holds island by island and regionally. Hindi, Urdu, and Chinese are languages of the home, and the younger generation are often no longer fluent in their use. In contrast, English creole has increased in significance in the Commonwealth Caribbean since decolonization; it is used extensively on radio broadcasts in Jamaica, and modern Jamaican novels, poems, and plays are often solely in English creole or move between it and standard English as the mood demands. A similar situation has existed for decades in Haiti, where the vast majority use French creole and neither read, write, nor understand standard French. The political incorporation of the French Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique) as overseas dpartements of France has resulted in the proliferation of standard French in those communities, while in Puerto Rico, Spanish is influenced by American English and by the so-called Spanglish (American English-Spanish) of returning migrants.