WEST INDIES

Colin Graham Clarke Spanish Indias Occidentales, French Indes Occidentales, Dutch West-indi crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles (3,200 km) long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea on the west and south from the Atlantic Ocean on the east and north. From the North American mainland peninsula of Florida in the north, the islands stretch 1,200 miles (1,930 km) southeastward, then 500 miles (800 km) south, then west along the north coast of Venezuela on the South American mainland. The land area of the islands is nearly 91,000 square miles (236,000 square km). The total population of the West Indies in 1990 was estimated at 33,640,000. The three major physiographic divisions of the West Indies are: the Greater Antilles, comprising the islands of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and Puerto Rico; the Lesser Antilles, including the Virgin Islands, Anguilla, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, and Grenada; and the isolated island groups of the North American continental shelf, The Bahamas, including the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the South American shelf, including Trinidad and Tobago, Aruba, Curaao, and Bonaire. Although physiographically not a part of the West Indies, Bermuda has common historical and cultural ties with the other islands and is often included in the West Indies. For current history and for statistics on society and economy, see Britannica Book Of The Year. region that includes all of the islands which extend through the Caribbean Sea from the tip of the Florida Peninsula to the northern coast of South America. They include 23 political entities, some of them quite small and relatively unknown to the outside world. The West Indies derives its coherence and distinctiveness from a combination of four factors, one geographic, the other three historical. The geographic feature is insularity, and the three historical themes are colonialism, the sugar plantation, and slavery. The West Indies range in size from Cuba, with an area of 42,804 square miles (110,861 square kilometres) and more than 10 million inhabitants, down to the tiny, uninhabited rocky islets of the Grenadines and the Virgin Islands. Most of the islands are smaller than Barbados, which has an area of 166 square miles and a quarter of a million inhabitants. Their physical fragmentation and the small size of most islands prepared the West Indies for a long history of colonialism and external domination and dependency. Territorial partition of the West Indies among the Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Danish brought heavy recurrent fighting to the region in the 17th and 18th centuries; colonial possessions were captured in time of war only to be traded through peace treaties in furtherance of the geopolitical ambitions of the imperial powers. Colonial partition of the West Indies has had a number of important consequences. Interisland connections have remained weak, because each colonizing power tended to dominate relationships with its own colonies. Where interisland linkage has occurred, it has been confined largely to islands belonging to the same European language group (each of these usually being of the same colonial affiliation). Moreover, the method of decolonization has generally followed these same political-linguistic lines. A further differentiating factor stems from this linguistic fragmentation. The Hispanic islands have a double identityWest Indian (or Caribbean) but also Latin-American; this is lacking in the English-, French-, and Dutch-speaking territories, where identities are above all insular. (The term Latin America is, however, often used geographically to encompass all of the territory south of the United States to Antarctica.) If colonialism has been effaced over time by decolonizationand some parts of the West Indies experienced almost 500 years of European imperialismthe dominating economic entity of sugar monoculture, too, has diminished in all but Cuba and Saint Kitts. The rise of West Indian peasantries after the 19th-century slave emancipation, and economic diversification into industry, tourism, mining, and oil and natural gas drilling in the 20th, have transformed the economic base in most societies, especially since World War II. Plantations continue to occupy vast tracts of land, but their social significance has declined as people have left the countryside, either moving to the towns or emigrating to other countries. Still, dependence on one or a few products is the major economic problem in most of the states. The most blatant forms of racial discrimination built into West Indian systems of slavery began to disappear with emancipation more than a century and a half ago, and the process has been hastened by decolonization. Nevertheless, most West Indian societies remain stratified by colour, culture, and class, and even in postrevolutionary Cuba, which is predominantly a white society, blacks are notably absent from the revolutionary leadership, despite the official elimination of class and colour lines. In the English-, French-, and Dutch-speaking territories, decolonization has created a mulatto and black political elite, although its position has been challenged in Trinidad and Tobago, where the large East Indian population has for long been in opposition, having been included in a coalition government since 1986. Generally the black political elites, supported by white and mulatto commercial interests, have promoted a multiracial ethic, which in most instances accepts the social order. This has been less true of Jamaica in particular, where white emigration, a powerful and creative arts movement, and the entrenchment of nationalistic governments since 1972 have led to the elaboration of a strong, black national identity. Despite the region's common historical background and insularity, little cohesiveness or unity has developed among the West Indian states. Divided linguistically and culturally, the West Indies can for practical purposes be categorized into four distinct groupings according to common historical and political backgrounds: a Hispanic group plus Haiti, with long histories of political dictatorship and recurrent U.S. intervention; the British West Indiesnow usually called the Commonwealth Caribbean (which includes mainland Belize and Guyana) and united through various regional associations such as the Caribbean Community and Common Market (Caricom) and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS); the French Antilles (Guadeloupe and Martinique), now politically incorporated with their dependencies into France proper as overseas dpartements; and the Netherlands Antilles, from which Aruba was constitutionally separated in 1986 pending a decision on independence. Haiti and the Dominican Republic have observer status at Caricom meetings, but Cuba's membership in the socialist, mostly eastern European economic group Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) and Puerto Rico's quasi-colonial ties to the United States make Pan-West Indian economic and political cooperation a difficult realization. The one institution of which virtually all West Indian states are members is the regional meteorologic service: hurricanes ignore all distinctions of West Indian people. Additional reading General information on the West Indies and on the countries of the region is found in South America, Central America, and the Caribbean (biennial), a reference work from the Europa Publications series; The South American Handbook, ed. by John Brooks (annual); and The Caribbean Handbook, ed. by Jeremy Taylor (annual). David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture, and Environmental Change Since 1492 (1987), offers an authoritative historical geography that focuses on the human impact on the natural environment. Detailed geographic analysis is provided in Robert C. West and John P. Augelli, Middle America: Its Lands and Peoples, 3rd ed. (1989). Guides to the West Indies include Birnbaum's The Caribbean, Bermuda, and the Bahamas (annual); and Eugene H. Kaplan, A Field Guide to Southeastern and Caribbean Seashores (1988), and A Field Guide to Coral Reefs of the Caribbean and Florida (1982), the last two focusing on the fauna of the region. James Bond, Birds of the West Indies, 5th ed. (1985), is a well-illustrated reference work.Studies of the human population of the region include Sidney W. Mintz and Sally Price (eds.), FocusCaribbean, 11 issues (1984), a collection of essays on topics ranging from race and colour to language and emigration; David Lowenthal, West Indian Societies (1972), focusing on social structure and social conditions; Aaron Lee Segal (ed.), Population Policies in the Caribbean (1975); and H. Hoetink, The Two Variants in Caribbean Race Relations: A Contribution to the Sociology of Segmented Societies (1967; originally published in Dutch, 1962; reissued as Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of Two Variants, 1971). The society of the region is explored in M.G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (1965, reprinted 1974), and Culture, Race, and Class in the Commonwealth Caribbean (1984). See also Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean, the Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (1978) and Franklin W. Knight and Colin Palmer (eds.), The Modern Caribbean (1989). Race, class, education, and population growth are considered in Malcolm Cross, Urbanization and Urban Growth in the Caribbean: An Essay on Social Change in Dependent Societies (1979). The roots of Caribbean culture are explored in Margaret E. Crahan and Franklin W. Knight (eds.), Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link (1979). Peter A. Roberts, West Indians and Their Language (1988), is an informed synthesis of research findings.Economic analyses that address the history of the one-crop economy and the changes in attitude toward land since the emancipation of the slaves include Jean Besson and Janet Momsen (eds.), Land and Development in the Caribbean (1987); John S. Brierley and Hymie Rubenstein (eds.), Small Farming and Peasant Resources in the Caribbean (1988); and Malcolm Cross and Arnaud Marks (eds.), Peasants, Plantations, and Rural Communities in the Caribbean (1979). Works on the modern economies include Anthony Payne, The Politics of the Caribbean Community, 196179: Regional Integration Among New States (1980), on the efforts at economic integration; Caribbean Common Market, The Caribbean Community in the 1980s (1981), a review report on economic progress; Delisle Worrell, Small Island Economies: Structure and Performance in the English-Speaking Caribbean Since 1970 (1987), a study of postindependence developments; Clive Y. Thomas, The Poor and the Powerless: Economic Policy and Change in the Caribbean (1988), focusing on the analysis of nationalist economic models; and Carey R. D'Avino, Caribbean Tax Havens (1986), a specially commissioned report on the tax advantages for foreign investments, a specialty of the Caribbean economy.