Book Review “The Creole Archipelago. Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean”

Cristina Soriano, Villanova University, United States

Review

Oceans and seas have been pivotal for the Atlantic World historiography since the 1990’s. Up until recently, historians have engaged in thought-provoking debates about the contradictory visions of the sea as either a neutral space that served as a conduit of exchange or a place that required significant international regulation of the people and materials traversing it. One pioneering work that centered on the sea as a crucial unit of analysis was Julius Scott’s 1986’s PhD dissertation, recently published as The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (2018). Scott focused on the Caribbean Sea as a cultural space, a masterless one, that was simultaneously shaped and controlled by Spanish, British, French, Dutch, African, and Indigenous interventions.

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