8 - Towards a geography of Caribbean nationhood

Summary

At the end of the twentieth century, and also at the end of a half millennium of external political control, most Caribbean societies have achieved political independence. The principal exceptions are Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the French overseas departments, and a small number of tiny islands that continue to maintain formal links with Britain and the Netherlands. All Caribbean societies, whether formally independent or not, retain strong relationships with their previous colonial rulers as well as complex ties with the outside world in general through the necessity to trade and migrate. And all Caribbean societies, on the basis of location alone, remain geopolitically dominated by the United States.

The region's fragmented insularity, combined with its relative proximity to the North Atlantic metropoles, helps to explain why the Caribbean has been so intensely colonized and recolonized over the centuries. Beginning in the late fifteenth century “the Caribbean became a center of activity as direct sea mobility … was the key to empire and riches” (Maingot 1989: 259). In the centuries thereafter the region's direct accessibility to ocean transport and travel and the closeness of all Caribbean locales to the sea together suggest that a certain geographical inevitability may have helped to predetermine the Caribbean's long-standing colonial role in history.