Empire´s Crossroads: A New History of the Caribbean
Carrie Gibson
In Empire's Crossroads, Carrie Gibson offers readers a vivid, authoritative and action-packed history of the Caribbean. For Gibson, everything was created in the West Indies: the Europe of today, its financial foundations built with sugar money: the factories and mills built as a result of the work of slaves thousands of miles away; the idea of true equality as espoused in Saint Domingue in the 1790s; the slow progress to independence; and even globalization and migration, with the ships passing to and fro taking people and goods in all possible directions, hundreds of years before the term 'globalization' was coined.
From Cuba to Haiti, from Dominica to Martinique, from Jamaica to Trinidad, the story of the Caribbean is not simply the story of slaves and masters - but of fortune-seekers and pirates, scientists and servants, travellers and tourists. It is not only a story of imperial expansion - European and American - but of global connections, and also of life as it is lived in the islands, both in the past and today.
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About Carrie Gibson
Reviews for Empire´s Crossroads: A New History of the Caribbean
Spectator
Carrie Gibson manages to weave 500 years of complex history into a brilliant narrative ... [A] strikingly assured debut.
Observer
Carrie Gibson has written a compelling history of the Caribbean, rightly placing it at the heart of European imperialism. This is a gripping account by a gifted scholar and story-teller
Tristram Hunt A fine introduction to the history of a turbulent and fascinating region
The Times
Carrie Gibson has written a judicious, readable and extremely well-informed account of a part of the world whose history is seldom acknowledged. Too many people know the Caribbean only as a tourist destination; she takes us, instead, into its fascinating, complex and often tragic past. No vacation there will ever feel quite the same again.
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost Sharp, gripping ... packed with the stories of tyrants and insurgents, and images of violence and beauty ... A great read about some fantastically absorbing - and to many people, little-known - history ... An exceptionally impressive debut.
Alex von Tunzelman
Literary Review