In this clearly written and comprehensive narrative, Frank Moya Pons provides an alternative to fragmented national histories and monographic local approaches to the Caribbean by presenting an encompassing narrative that treats the region as a unified whole. He is particularly successful in integrating the histories of the Hispanic and non-His-panic Caribbean, which all too often fall into separate historiographies. Sugar provides the thread that integrates the region’s economic, social, and demographic history across space and over time. However, Moya Pons does not examine either sugar or the Caribbean from a narrowly economic point of view but rather treats them as the focus of international political rivalry, war, and diplomacy. From this perspective, he reconstructs the ways in which the unifying element of the sugar plantation produced the economic, social, and demographic diversity that characterizes the region.
The book begins with an account of the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean. The...
