Franklin W Knight

Every strong, cohesive community has a strong sense of itself rooted in a firm knowledge of its history, deliberately or unconsciously communicated down through generations.
People who flippantly admit that knowledge of history is relatively worthless in today's society are seriously intellectually challenged (or just plain dumb, as we would say before the age of political correctness). History is tremendously important to society in general and individuals in particular, since it constitutes a sort of moral power. That is why the philosopher George Santayana's declaration that those who forgot their past were destined to relive it has found resonance among thinkers and writers down through the years.

The Caribbean has an extremely rich past. Unfortunately this does not emerge in many of the histories written about the region. Even worse, too many teachers of history fail to communicate any excitement about the subject to their students. That is a great pity. This extraordinary richness of Caribbean history lies not merely in the great material wealth produced over centuries of exploiting the land or the mines of bauxite and pitch or petroleum reserves. That is a history reasonably well known if little appreciated. Slavery and the plantation, or even forms of modern capitalist exploitation constitute merely one dimension of the Caribbean's rich and varied history. It is time to rethink the history of the Caribbean to reflect the full measure of its richness and international value.

Caribbean history has also been extraordinarily rich in human resources. That has been less well known and considerably less understood. Caribbean people and Caribbean institutions have changed the face of history since the late fifteenth century. The people of the Caribbean after 1500 were a new people, dramatically creating a new environment.

By saying that they were a new people we mean that they formed from the very beginning societies and cultures more creatively and consciously diverse than anywhere else in the world. The invading Europeans shattered the societies and cultures of the indigenous Caribbean people and replaced every facet of their communities with newly-created institutions. Not only did they create new institutions, but they also created a whole new social type - blends of Native American, European, African and Asian. The Caribbean people reflect more variety than any other people on earth.

The nautical discoveries of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s and the decision of Spain to establish a landed empire in the Caribbean after 1502 initiated a process that is still ongoing. That was the year in which Nicolás de Ovando arrived in Hispaniola with some 1,500 settlers to set up a genuine Spanish frontier colony, pushing aside the Columbus family and whittling down the previous elaborate Columbus grant made by Queen Isabel of Castile. Columbus and his fellow travellers took back tobacco and the smoking habit to Europe - starting a number of lucrative Caribbean fashions that would sweep the world in the following centuries. Within two generations more than sixty-six per cent of the people living in the newly-created Spanish towns were mixtures between the conquering Spanish and African invaders and the subject populations. Mixing of any sort remains a notable Caribbean characteristic.

With the new people came new crops and new ways of creating wealth. Over the centuries the indigenous hardwood forests of the Caribbean gave way in many places to extensive cultivation of imported plants. Plantations became the productive centres for an export-oriented commercial system that provided the fillip for modern capitalism. Caribbean plantations were the first locales with massive productive labour units in the history of the world.

It is amazing how many of those export crops were also imported. The sugar cane came from Indonesia via India, the Mediterranean and the African Atlantic islands. Coffee came from Abyssinia. Cotton came from Egypt. Plantation crops fundamentally altered the natural environment. But in the 18th century important food crops were added to Caribbean flora, especially the mango from India and the breadfruit from the Pacific islands. Bananas came from Southeast Asia via Africa to the Caribbean. The histories of these crops are well worth integrating in the history of the people of the Caribbean.

Yet, if the commercial exports established the foundation for a thriving Atlantic commerce, Caribbean and mainland American food crops made their way around the world. In Europe, Africa and parts of Asia American-derived food crops revolutionised the ability of local communities to support larger families thereby boosting domestic populations. Corn, potato, cassava and peanut found their way into the world's diet. Today more than 60 per cent of all the world's food crops originated somewhere in the Americas.

To describe Caribbean societies as simple productive units of savage masters and resisting slaves tangentially connected to a wider Atlantic world of commerce obscures the dynamic societies of creative peoples that developed.
The great Haitian revolution of 1791-1804 resulted in President Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana purchase that more than doubled the geographical size of the United States.
Caribbean rum kept sailors, soldiers and the poor happy on both sides of the Atlantic for centuries. A Guyanese immigrant invented the last that revolutionised shoe manufacturing in Massachusetts in the 19th century. The Panama Canal could not have been completed without the armies of West Indian workers. Jamaica alone produced several products like Tia Maria, Pickapeppa sauce, Ting and Red Stripe beer that have been singularly successful on world markets. Not enough of these creative and important connections are examined in Caribbean history today.

More emphasis should be placed on the fundamental significance of the Caribbean region to the history of the wider world. The wider American history cannot be understood without the inclusion of the important Caribbean dimension, and no wider world history can be appreciated without the crucial role of the Caribbean in the construction of the modern world.

Two of the earliest universities anywhere in the Americas were established in the Caribbean: in Santo Domingo in 1535 and in Havana in 1728. Intellectual life of the highest caliber has a very long ancestry across the region as many writers have shown, especially the monumental historiographical works of Elsa V Goveia, Gordon K Lewis, and B W Higman. Even Caribbean territories without universities were producing distinguished intellectuals from a very early date. One of the earliest professors of Latin at Harvard University in the United States of America was Douglas Judah of Jamaica who served on the faculty in the 1770s. Alexander Hamilton of Nevis crafted the economic system of the newly established United States and ranked, before his untimely death, among the illustrious intellectual stars of the new American republic. The seminal work on parliamentary privilege in Canada was written by Trinidadian Joseph Maingot in 1982 while the famous medical textbook, Maingot's Abdominal Operations, originally written by Rodney Maingot of the same Trinidad family, is presently in its ninth edition. Today Caribbean scholars, their numbers too numerous to mention, enhance the faculties of universities across the world.

The stories of Caribbean accomplishments are as legion as they are important. By knowing those the Caribbean people will feel better about themselves. They might also feel constrained to carry on the fine tradition of excellence.

Franklin W Knight is professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

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