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The history of the Caribbean provides a clear illustration of the ‘control’ method of imposed democratization and of the comparative effectiveness of three sub‐types of control—incorporation, invasion, and intimidation. It also raises challenging questions regarding the effectiveness of US democratization pressure on the region, with only Puerto Rico (incorporation) existing as a fully consolidated democracy. Other forms of democratic imposition have occurred in Panama (invasion) and Nicaragua (intimidation), using very different methods and producing very different results.

This introductory chapter outlines the role that ancient Greece and Rome — as both cultural ideals and antitypes — have played and continue to play in the construction of Caribbean cultural identity in anglophone Caribbean literature. It contends that to overlook dialogues between the Caribbean and ancient Greece and Rome is to perpetuate an odd occlusion in the Caribbean's cultural space and suggests that, rather than projecting alien influences onto the Caribbean, these dialogues might help us to better understand the distinctiveness of anglophone Caribbean literature and may also contribute fresh insights to the study of ancient Greece. Accordingly, the apparent tension in the compound term ‘Afro‐Greeks’ is used to open up an exchange of ideas between spheres of culture that are seemingly incommensurable.

There appears to have been more genuine idealism in the approach of American states than in other regions. CERD has questioned states in this region concerning the implications of the Convention for the protection of indigenous peoples. The USA's ratification of the Convention in 1994 was subject to reservations that are controversial in international law.

Describes the impact of World War II on Anglo-American-Caribbean relations and the still-nascent decolonization process. Identifies “three R's” of the Roosevelt adminstration's diplomacy regarding the West Indies: “realism” or security concerns, reformism, and race. All three met in the construction of U.S. bases in the islands, in the establishment of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission (AACC), in the diasporan cooperation between expatriates and African Americans that helped to bring about revision of the Jamaican constitution, and to a lesser extent in the Anglo-American conflict over Jamaican bauxite. The AACC became an arena of “competitive colonialism” as both Washington and London used their respective colonies to prove their good faith as reformers of the colonial regime, and used them as testing-grounds for the competing American and British visions of the postwar world.

The starting point for this chapter is Antonio Benítez‐Rojo's concept of the ‘path of words’ to explain the repetition of motifs in travel writers who undertake the same journeys. This repetitive path of words is an important route for the introduction of classical motifs into modern Caribbean literature. The chapter studies the constant return to Greece in Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Traveller's Tree: A Journey through the Caribbean Islands (1950), and contrasts Fermor's neo‐Hellenic analogies with J. A. Froude's notorious Homeric analogy in The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (1887). One of the legacies of these travel accounts is that the Caribbean is represented as an accident of Greece, a curious ‘other’ Mediterranean. Since both Froude and Fermor's accounts appeal to Homer's Odyssey as a legitimizing text for their travel accounts, the second section explores Derek Walcott's fashioning of a New World Odyssey that writes back to Froude and Fermor, and shares tropes with other responses to The Odyssey in the Caribbean.

This chapter proposes that one of the ways in which Caribbean Classics has been liberated from the colonial curriculum is through the rejection of the idea of a continuous transmission of empire from Rome's empire to the British Empire. Starting with Austin Clarke's The Polished Hoe (2002), the chapter traces variations on this theme in V. S. Naipaul (The Mimic Men (1967), and A Bend in the River (1979) ), and the poetry of Derek Walcott. These writers each play with the misquotation and mistranslation of Latin in modern Caribbean literature in order to expose gaps and elisions in British colonial appropriations of Classics. It transpires that the misquotation of Latin in these texts is not a simple matter. Particularly in Clarke and Naipaul, misquotation shows up a miscarriage in the process of translation and, correspondingly, a miscarriage in the succession of empire. If the classical texts quoted in colonial contexts mean something else, or are misquoted, then the narrative of imperial continuity (the translatio studii et imperii) loses cogency.

This chapter complicates the idea of any easy balance sheet of appropriation in which misappropriation always falls on the side of empire and colonialism and appropriation on the side of the anti‐ and postcolonial. The argument examines the different ways in which C. L. R. James and Eric Williams attempted to harness Athens as an empowering model for Trinidadian national identity. Although James and Williams approached Athens in different ways, they shared the determination to take back Classics from the colonial archive via which it had been transmitted. In the case of James, the discussion concentrates on his repeated analogies between the culture and society of Trinidad and the culture and society of classical Athens. In the case of Williams, the discussion focuses on his ability to make political capital out of his classical education in his early political career, focusing on his lectures and speeches for the PEM and PNM in the 1950s and 1960s.

This final chapter argues that the study of the reception of Classics in the anglophone Caribbean needs to focus not just on the dialogue with the literatures of Greece and Rome, but also on the dialogue between Caribbean authors themselves. To this end, discussion turns to the Jamaican poet Figueroa, who many critics have identified as an important precursor for the New World classicism in Walcott's poetry. Similarly, Kamau Brathwaite's revision of universal history in X/Self is seen to offer an important framework for Caribbean Classics in view of the poet's contention that the Caribbean's history of catastrophe presents a logical vantage point from which to survey the global succession of empires leading back to Rome and beyond. The book concludes with the suggestion that anglophone Caribbean writers have recalibrated the canon so that they are the natural successors of Horace, or Ovid, writing from the provinces and holding the cultural centre.

This chapter explores theoretical responses to and departures from the modern world system. The first part looks into Anibal Quijano's concept of “coloniality of power” and Enrique Dussel's “transmodernity” as responses to global designs from colonial histories and legacies in Latin America. The second part is devoted to Abdelkhebir Khatibi's “double critique” and “une pensée autre” (an other thinking) as a response from colonial histories and legacies in Maghreb. The chapter also studies Edouard Glissant's notion of “Créolization,” proposed to account for the colonial experience of the Caribbean in the horizon of modernity and as a new epistemological principle. These perspectives, from Spanish America, Maghreb, and the Caribbean, contribute today to rethinking, critically, the limits of the modern world system—the need to conceive it as a modern/colonial world system and to tell stories not only from inside the “modern” world but from its borders.

Canada is a classic country of immigration, with 21 percent of its working-age population being first generation and a further 9 percent second generation. It employs a ‘point system’ for selection of economic immigrants, and indeed the first generation proves to be highly educated (more so indeed than the charter population). While a number of visible minority groups in the first generation experience substantial disadvantages, in the second generation the one clearly disadvantaged group (in net terms) are the Caribbeans. Almost every other group in the second generation has achieved or surpassed parity with the charter group of the British. Whether this success of the second generation is due to Canadian policies of multiculturalism or to the lagged effects of the ‘point system’ for entry cannot be determined from these data. However, major disadvantages continue to be experienced by the Aboriginals both in employment and in occupational attainment.

From 1538 the new Protestant church of Henry VIII provided a system of registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials in all parishes of England and Wales. This chapter re-examines the original motives behind the creation of this system, and explores the reasons for its effectiveness and persistence over the ensuing three centuries in Britain by surveying the comparative history of identity registration systems among the British overseas in the early modern period. A review of the variety of measures for registration set up in the North American and Caribbean colonies during the course of the seventeenth century confirms the importance of the security of property-holding in an increasingly commercial world as a motive for creating such systems. However, this review also indicates the importance of whether or not effective social security systems, giving entitlements to relief, accompanied these early identity registration schemes.

The seven years following the Carrs return from Honduras proved to be highly productive and successful. Carr published High Jungles and Low and the Handbook of Turtles. He also inaugurated his study of the ecology and migration of sea turtles with funding from the American Philosophical Society, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. Carr's experiences during preliminary research trips provided fodder for another popular travel narrative, The Windward Road. Fortuitously, The Windward Road came to the attention of Joshua Powers, who rallied the support of his friends to form the Brotherhood of the Green Turtle and the Caribbean Conservation Corporation, an organization dedicated to the conservation of sea turtles. Thus, even as Carr's study of sea turtles was gaining momentum, he secured additional and unanticipated support for related conservation efforts.

Prior to the 19th century, the plantation islands of the Caribbean were the most-valued possessions in the overseas Imperial world. Most valuable by far were the sugar plantations, which ranged from as little as eighty to as much as 2,000 or more acres of land, and from forty to 500 or more slave labourers. By the decade of the 1680s, the sugar planters, especially those of Barbados, were feeling the effects of low prices and rising costs of production. The price decline was the result of an increase in supplies of sugar from Brazil and the English and French Caribbean islands relative to consumer demand in European markets. Old and new problems faced the planters in the thirty-five years from 1714 to 1748. It seems evident that around the middle of the century economic conditions began to improve in Jamaica and in other British Caribbean colonies as output increased while prices, sustained by a buoyant demand in the home market, remained at a higher level than in previous decades.

This chapter examines imbalances in approaches to the archaeological study of the history of slavery in Africa and the African Diaspora. It argues that the main causes of interpretive problems are a lack of coordination between disciplines and regional specialisms. A ‘Kormantse’ case study, bridging Africa and the Caribbean, is used to demonstrate how archaeological endeavours may attempt to address such imbalances in understanding African cultures. Yet, despite recent gains, most archaeological researchers and projects continue to maintain their guarded interests, even where it is clear that they need to reach out and connect the two sides of the Atlantic.

Kamau Brathwaite's Odale's Choice, an adaptation of Antigone designed for school children to perform, figures and enacts the birth of a nation, as Ghana, where it was first produced, becomes the first African country to achieve independence from a European colonial power. The bleakest aspects of the play are read as representations of both the necessary sacrifices that must be made to achieve independence and the unnecessary sacrifices that may be demanded after independence. The Pan-African implications of this play by an Afro-Caribbean writer are contrasted with the Pan-Caribbean vision articulated in Derek Walcott's Omeros. In the debate among Caribbean writers and critics about the historical, epistemological and political priority of the constituent cultures of the region, Omeros's fixation on Greek models is an answer to Brathwaite's assertion of African antecedents. Against all efforts to privilege any of the region's cultures, Omeros plots the limits of even its own Greek apparatus.