The end of the calendar year always brings some inevitable chores. The government wants to know how much individual taxpayers earned and spent, so bookkeeping duties assume paramount importance. Conventionally, the approaching New Year also elicits explicit or implicit personal wishes of all sorts. For lovers of books, it is the time to review and evaluate the past year’s reading. In this case, the original selection ranged too broadly among histories, novels and scientific works, so the decision was made to reduce the recommendations to a few books relevant for a Caribbean bookshelf.

By any ranking, the past year produced some exceptional publications. Although I read just a small fraction of the publications, it is pleasantly surprising how many of these outstanding books dealt with Caribbean themes. The criteria for my list were that each work had to be exceptionally readable, provide some special insight on the subject, and appeal to anyone interested in the Caribbean. The many other excellent books read during the year were automatically excluded owing to space restrictions.

Patrick Bryan of the University of the West Indies at Mona produced an exceptionally written, engagingly nuanced and beautifully illustrated biography of Edward Seaga published by the UWI Press. Bryan, the Douglas Hall Professor of History at Mona, is a prolific writer and this excellent biography testifies to his considerable command of Jamaican history. Based on solid archival research and a superb bibliography, his Edward Seaga and the Challenges of Modern Jamaica expertly covers the principal character in the context of a dynamic and changing country between the 1890s and 2005.

Robert Morris Financier of the American Revolution by the distinguished prize-winning writer Charles Rappleye is a compelling book. Morris is perhaps the least familiar of the movers and shakers who produced the American Revolution. Although a signer of the declaration of independence – his signature appears just below the bold lettering of John Hancock – and the major financier of the revolution, Morris evokes none of the spontaneous resonance of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison or Adams. Yet his economic wizardry was indispensable for the military success of the colonial insurgents. Like the country he helped found, the life of Morris is a story of improbably magnificent achievement fostered by the unlimited opportunities of the age. Starting his career as an apprentice, Morris became a highly successful international merchant whose ingenuity and collaboration with the wealthy, well-connected Cuban Juan de Miralles y Trailhon made possible the military successes at Valley Forge, Trenton and Yorktown that ended British control of the 13 colonies. By the 1790s Morris lost his fortune and ended up spending nearly four years in the Philadelphia debtor’s jail.

Perhaps the two most outstanding individuals in the history of the sugar industry in modern republican Cuba were Manuel Rionda and Julio Lobo. In 2003 Muriel McAvoy produced an excellent biography of Rionda. Now John Paul Rathbone, the Financial Times journalist and World Bank economist with established Cuban ancestry, has published a wonderful, delightfully readable book called The Sugar King of Havana: The Rise and Fall of Julio Lobo, Cuba’s Last Tycoon. Like Morris, the life of Lobo parallelled the wildly fluctuating fortunes of his country. He frolicked with movie stars like Esther Williams, Joan Fontaine and Bette Davis while keeping a shrewd eye on the world sugar market that he dominated until the Castro revolution overtook his world in 1959.

Just when one thought there could be nothing new about Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican friar, humanist and officially designated protector of the early indigenous population, Lawrence Clayton of the University of Alabama comes up with a marvellously fresh study that represents an extraordinary contribution to the general history of the Spanish in the Americas. Bartolomé de Las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas deserves a place on every Caribbean bookshelf.

In Matanzas: The Cuba Nobody Knows, native son Miguel Bretos of the Smithsonian Institution presents a magnificently researched, highly engaging and seamlessly organised combination of local urban biography and personal autobiography. This small northern coastal city was the cradle of the larger Cuban history, culture and society.

Methodologically and otherwise it is difficult to think of a better book than Gillian McGillivray’s Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, & State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959. This superb examination is indispensable for understanding the complex society that developed in Cuba between the middle of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th.

The Haitian Revolution has finally begun to gain its rightful premier place in the age of the great revolutions. Jane Landers’ Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions provides a unique perspective on Georges Biassou, Prince Whitten, Francisco Menendez and a number of other Africans and African-Americans who expertly manoeuvred the kaleidoscopic changes of the period with consummate skill. Jeremy Popkin has followed his remarkable Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Revolution (2007) with You are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (2010). The later book is a brilliant examination of the seminal importance of the declaration of this abolition to the history of France, Haiti, and the wider Atlantic world.

Very few books provide as comprehensive an exploration of the theme of imperialism as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State edited by Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano of the University of Wisconsin. Fifty scholars from four continents assess with extraordinary sophistication the unexpected boomerang impact of imperial ventures on domestic US state formation, prison policies, education, race, public health, military training, and environmental management.

The selection of books, like the selection of anything having to do with personal taste, remains a subjective undertaking. Other readers may rightly have other suggestions. But it is clear that books about the Caribbean or relevant to Caribbean history rank highly among international publications. Given that some of the finest publishers are found in the Caribbean, that should come as no surprise. Even more encouraging are the splendid Caribbean books in the pipeline for 2011.