This is a largely rewritten and greatly expanded second edition of a text that, in its original 1978 form, failed to fulfill a pressing need by erring on the skimpy side.
As the author explains, the revision is motivated by the expansion of monographic literature on the Caribbean and by significant events that have occurred over the last dozen years, as well as by specific criticisms of the first edition. The book contains a valuable selected guide to additional reading expanded by 50 percent and including works down to 1990, as well as a half-page addition to the chronology of events since 1978. Overall, the book has increased in size from 251 to 389 pages, but the major changes are in the second half. The first six chapters are essentially the same, a third augmented by minor corrections and the addition of material such as slave demographic statistics derived from the work of Barry Higman. The original chapter 7, dealing with nation building since 1804, however, has been tripled in size and split into four, raising the number of chapters from 8 to 11.
These four new chapters, dealing successively with Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Commonwealth Caribbean, are crucial to the book s main theme, that of a potential nationality compromised by political, economic, and cultural fragmentation. Knight’s thesis is that each territory, once it has emerged from colonial status, has first to achieve viable political statehood before passing on to the cultural status of a nation—a status that may eventually include most or even all the territories in the region. But the clear necessity of having to divide the description of the historical process into four subregional chapters underlines that very fragmentation that the author, by implication, deplores.
All four new chapters strengthen the work as a whole, but they are noticeably uneven in quality. That on Cuba, as befits the work of a distinguished Cubanist, is the strongest: judiciously balanced, accurate, up to date, and interestingly written. The chapter on Puerto Rico and the section on the Dominican Republic, though derivative, are models of precise information and concise argument, particularly useful to anglophone students less able than Knight to master the relevant literature. The section on Haiti is patchy. The account of the revolutionary era takes advantage of much of the excellent recent literature but curiously does not mention the preliminary revolt of Vincent Ogé, while the analysis of Haiti’s postrevolutionary failure is marred by an unwillingness to criticize any black rulers (even Faustin Soulouque) while at the same time missing the chance adequately to blame the cynical indifference and exploitation of external powers.
Surprising in a book by a Jamaican-born author, the most disappointing chapter is that on nation building in the Commonwealth Caribbean. The overall theme is sustained well enough, but the effect is weakened by casual presentation. The author would have been better served by an editor prepared to correct loose syntax, cloudiness, clichés, or verbal mannerisms such as the redundant “of course.” But he must himself take responsibility for such faults as inaccurate lists, confusing labels (such as the use of the term Crown Colony for two distinctly different constitutions), or actual errors, including a confusion between the Turks and Caicos and the Cayman Islands and the denial of a continuous representative assembly to the Bahamas. Such flaws are reparable, but without repair this book remains no more than the best, faute de mieux.
