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Caribbean- Geography and History |
In every age and era, caribbean islands were always be a great source of tourism because of it's mind blowing scenes, it's great geographical location and a place of beautiful beaches. There are so many renowned islands in the caribbean. Some of them are Jamaica, Trinidad, Tobago, Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent , the Grenadines, Grenada, Barbados, the Leeward Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, etc. To the casual observer, these islands might appear to be too disparate to allow for a common discussion. Consider, for instance, the differences in population, size, income, ethnic composition, and political status among the various islands. Anguilla's 7,000 residents live on an island totaling 91 square kilometers, whereas Jamaica has a population of 2.3 million and a territory of nearly 11,000 square kilometers. The per capita gross domestic product of the Cayman Islands is nearly fourteen times as large as that of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Trinidad and Tobago's population is evenly divided between blacks and East Indians, a pattern quite different from that on the other islands, on which blacks constitute an overwhelming majority. Although most of the islands are independent nations.
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The transformation of caribbean islands during the seventeenth century from a tobacco- to a sugar-based economy permanently changed life on the islands, as a plantation society employing African slave labor replaced the previous society of small landholders. By the early nineteenth century, blacks constituted at least 80 percent of the population in all but one of the British Caribbean islands. The exception was Trinidad, which had begun bringing in large numbers of slaves only in the 1780s and 1790s. When the British abolished slavery in the Caribbean in the 1830s, Trinidadian planters imported indentured labor from India to work the sugarcane fields. Despite their numerical minority, whites continued to control political and economic affairs throughout the islands. Indeed, the all-white House of Assembly in Jamaica abolished itself in 1865 rather than share power with blacks. This abrogation of local assemblies and establishment of crown colony government was the norm in the British Caribbean in the late 1800s and impeded the development of political parties and organizations.
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Demands for political reform quickened after World War I with the appearance of a nascent middle class and the rise of trade unions. In the mid-1930s, the islands became engulfed by riots spawned by the region's difficult economic conditions. The riots demonstrated the bankruptcy of the old sugar plantation system and sounded the death knell for colonial government. Beginning in the 1940s, the British allowed increasing levels of self-government and encouraged the emergence of moderate black political leaders. As a prelude to political independence for the region, the British established a federation in 1958 consisting of ten island groupings. The West Indies Federation succumbed, however, to the parochial concerns of the two largest members--Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago--both of which declared independence in 1962. Between 1966 and 1983, eight additional independent nations were carved out of the British Caribbean.
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The Europeans who invaded and conquered Caribbean terminated the internally cohesive world of the native peoples and subordinated the region and the peoples to the events of a wider world in which their fortunes were linked with those of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
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The Caribbean peoples were devastated by new epidemic diseases, such as measles, smallpox, malaria, and dysentery, introduced by the Europeans and the Africans imported as slaves. Their social and political organizations were restructured in the name of Christianity. Their simple lives were regimented by slavery and the demands of profit-oriented, commercial-minded Europeans. Above all, they were slowly inundated culturally by the stream of new immigrants in the years immediately after the conquest.
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