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The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion. Edited by ROBERT L. PAQUETTE and STANLEY L. ENGERMAN. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, I996. Photograph. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. xii, 383 pp. Cloth, $4995
This collection of essays brings well-deserved attention to one of the economic crossroads of the modern international age. The contributors, well-known historians and social scientists, examine topics ranging from the pre-Columbian population of these microislands to the character of their postemancipation societies. Claiming with some validity to be "the only single volume treatment in English of the Lesser Antilles" (book jacket), this compilation has received the imprimatur of such luminaries as Richard Dunn, Jack Greene, and Eugene Genovese (back jacket).
Part one examines issues concerning the aboriginal populations of these islands, and is the least satisfactory segment. Only aficionados of this question will be willing to follow William Keegan and Louis Allaire as they tackle in very different ways the baffling issue of who were the Island Caribs. The authors do usefully reinforce the emerging consensus that the traditional, Manichean view of the Island Arawaks as peaceful lambs and of their supposed bitter enemies, the Island Caribs, as voracious wolves has no historical basis. The last essay in part one, by Ken Kiple, discusses in very speculative terms possible medical reasons for the long-term decline of the Island Carib population. Unfortunately, the author deploys neither manuscript nor printed sources in French, by far the most important literary ones for Island Carib questions. Nor are his references updated...