The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

Abstract

In this book, Tessa Murphy examines the cultural, political, and economic transformations of “the Creole Archipelago,” an interconnected island grouping composed of Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, and Tobago. Murphy successfully demonstrates how this space evolved into a “center of broader imperial experimentation and contestation” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 4). However, this is not a story of imperial competition for political and commercial supremacy. Instead, Murphy persuades readers to rethink the history of the colonial Caribbean. Rather than portraying the Lesser Antilles as discrete national dominions, The Creole Archipelago recounts how these archipelagic borderlands were shaped by the interplay of Europeans, Indigenous Kalinagos, and free and enslaved African descendants. Murphy depicts the emergence of a culturally, politically, and religiously entangled archipelago connected to the Atlantic world but also molded by local dynamics and people. The author's meticulous analysis of multi-imperial sources from repositories in France, the United Kingdom, Martinique, Dominica, Grenada, and the United States allows her to elucidate the formation of this interconnected zone—a hub of new notions of colonial subjecthood, race, and dominion.The book is organized chronologically. After a chapter analyzing how treaty making between Indigenous Kalinagos and French and English colonists was critical in determining seventeenth-century Antillean geopolitics, chapter 2 examines the development of peculiar colonial spaces in Kalinago territories. Ordinary people from the French Antilles looked for opportunity and mobility on Kalinago islands, creating autonomous slave societies beyond imperial control. Chapter 3 analyzes how the Seven Years' War facilitated the development of an absentee plantocracy in the eastern Caribbean with direct connections to slave traders operating in Africa. The Creole Archipelago aligns perfectly with scholarship examining the role of Afro-descendants as legal subjects in the Atlantic world. In chapter 4, Murphy's masterful use of colonial correspondence as well as parish and land records allows her to demonstrate how the post–Seven Years' War eastern Caribbean—not nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and Asia—became the epicenter of early debates and disputes over the rights and privileges of colonial subjects. While Great Britain challenged French Catholics' landownership rights in former Kalinago islands, French settlers and free Afro-descendants embraced British legal culture to protect their rights. Chapter 5 illuminates the relationship between the expansion of sugar plantations, marronage, and racialization in the Creole Archipelago. Murphy also invites us to reexamine the course of important events in Atlantic history. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the American and French Revolutions as episodes of civil and interimperial warfare.The Creole Archipelago joins recent studies that persuasively historicize colonial expansion in the Americas as a process of cross-cultural contact, diplomacy, and contestation. Moreover, the author paints a picture of Caribbean history that is much more intricate than narratives centered exclusively on mercantilism, the slave trade, and plantations. By exploring this space through the lenses of creolization and cultural symbiosis, Murphy makes significant contributions to the literature on imperial formations, race, and subjecthood. The Lesser Antilles were a contested space and served as a laboratory for colonial regulations on people of African descent, regulations that were subsequently implemented in places such as Saint-Domingue and Louisiana. Similarly, the legacy of French colonial society continued under British rule after the Seven Years' War, facilitating spaces of participation and opportunity for French Catholics, both white and free Afro-descendants. The Creole Archipelago also highlights the limitations of exploring turmoil during the Age of Revolutions as responses to political forces emanating from Europe, the 13 colonies, or even Saint-Domingue. In the Creole Archipelago, ordinary people forged alliances that responded more to local political conditions and personal interests than to metropolitan forces, loyalties, and ideologies.Given this journal's Latin American focus, this reviewer wonders whether more emphasis could have been placed on the role of Spanish people in the Creole Archipelago. Certainly, Murphy underscores how Spanish traders from Margarita, Cumaná, and Caracas patronized cacao markets in Saint Vincent. The author also points out the significance of Spanish troops in the French Revolutionary wars. Yet readers might be curious about the relationships between islands such as Tobago and Grenada and Spanish South America, and to what extent these interactions also shaped the Creole Archipelago. Nonetheless, these omissions do not undermine Murphy's sophisticated argument and important scholarly contributions in the least. By seriously considering Indigenous and Black agency, she is better able to portray the Lesser Antilles' complexity beyond the restrictive paradigms of the British West Indies and the French Antilles. The Creole Archipelago is an excellent book that questions established notions of subjecthood and empire “in order to understand the region in a way that would have made sense to those who lived there” (p. 16).