Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

Tessa Murphy's book "The Creole Archipelago" explores how generations of Indigenous Kalinagos, enslaved Africans, and settlers from European nations used maritime routes to forge social, economic, and informal political connections in the eastern Caribbean. She argues that imperial frameworks typically used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean are at odds with the geographic realities that shaped daily life in the region. Murphy's book offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies and resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes.

Format: Hardback
Length: 352 pages
Publication date: 08 October 2021
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

In the captivating Creole Archipelago, Tessa Murphy delves into the intricate web of social, economic, and informal political connections that thrived across the eastern Caribbean through maritime routes. By examining a chain of volcanic islands, each visible from the next, Murphy challenges the traditional imperial frameworks commonly used to analyze the early colonial Caribbean. Through a comprehensive array of sources, including historical maps, parish records, an Indigenous-language dictionary, and colonial correspondence housed in various countries such as the Caribbean, France, England, and the United States, Murphy unveils how this watery borderland became a hub of broader imperial experimentation, contention, and reform. British and French officials dispatched to Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Tobago after 1763 encountered a society that had undergone a process of creolization, frustrating their attempts to transform the islands into productive plantation colonies. By centering the stories of Kalinagos who asserted their continued claims to land, French Catholics who demanded the privileges of British subjects, and free people of African descent who insisted on their right to own land and enslaved people, Murphy offers a vivid counterpoint to larger Caribbean plantation societies like Jamaica and Barbados. By expanding our gaze outward from the eastern Caribbean chain, The Creole Archipelago resituates small islands as microcosms of broader historical processes that played a crucial role in understanding early American and Atlantic history, including the European usurpation of Indigenous lands and cultures.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780812253382