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Oostindie, Gert (2005) Paradise Overseas: The Dutch Caribbean, Colonialism and its Transatlantic Legacies, London, Macmillan Caribbean, 204pp. ISBN: 1-405057130.
The Caribbean with some 37 million inhabitants is probably one of the most racially or culturally diverse regions of the world populated by a polyglot of peoples. There are whites, blacks, browns, yellows, reds, and an assortment of shades in between. There are Europeans, Africans, Asian Indians, Indonesian Javanese, Chinese, Aboriginal Indians, and many mixes. There are Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Rastafarians, Santería, Winti, and Vudun, amongst other creeds. They speak in a multitude of tongues: Spanish, English, Dutch, French and a diverse number of creoles such as Papiamentu, Sranan Tongo, Ndjuka, Saramaccan, Kromanti, Kreyol, as well as Hindustani, Bhojpuri and Urdu. Perhaps, no other region of the world is so richly varied. The Caribbean region has been truncated into sub-linguistic subsets reflecting the early pattern of colonization by an assortment of European powers. The Dutch parts, on which this book review is focused, include Suriname which has been independent since 1975, and the Netherlands Antilles constituted of the islands of Aruba, Curacao, Bonaire, Saba, St. Maarten and St. Eustatius. The Dutch Antilles is integrally linked by the constitutional Charter of 1954 to the Dutch state as equal partners. There is one anomalous island, St. Maarten, which is a split jurisdiction, jointly run by The Netherlands and France.
This volume focuses on the Dutch Caribbean. Its author, Oostindie, Director of Caribbean Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, sets out to explore the underlying historical themes of the Dutch presence in the Caribbean, which continue after four centuries of colonial control. Oostindie, who is Dutch, emotionally agonizes over the Dutch failure and negligence in administering to its colonies as he is obsessed with continuing Dutch efforts to oversee and assist in the post-independence era. The Dutch Caribbean sphere covered in this volume is constituted of territories that are individually very different from each other. For instance, Suriname with some 430,000 citizens plus another 30,000 Brazilian migrants, is constituted of almost a dozen ethnic communities made up mainly of 'Hindustanis', originally from India (about 33% of the population); Creoles descended from African slaves (about 25 to 30%);...