Empire's Crossroads review 'a strikingly assured history of the Caribbean'

Carrie Gibson pinpoints how sugar and slavery have bankrolled the modern globalised world

Washing up on the shores of San Salvador island on 12 October 1492, Christopher Columbus described the Amerindian natives he first met as "sweet and gentle". Too trusting, perhaps, for the seeds of exploitation were sown in those early days of the Caribbean adventure. Spain's fledgling empire builders would soon begin to make a distinction between the tractable Taino and the hostile Carib, depicting the latter as violent and cannibalistic. Bringing with them disease, military power and evangelistic zeal, the Europeans had decimated the indigenous population before the end of the 16th century. Needing a commodity that would make them rich, and the labour to produce it, they would quickly turn to sugar and African slavery as the sources of their future prosperity.

By 1700, English ships alone had transported some 400,000 slaves from the west coast of Africa to work on sugar plantations in Caribbean colonies like Barbados and Jamaica, and millions would be enslaved during the 18th century. Olaudah Equiano, a North American slave who eventually bought his freedom, published a horrifying account of his experiences in 1789, starting with the notorious "Middle Passage" at sea, when "the shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying" filled him with dread.

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