Caribbean/West Indies

The West Indian islands circling the Caribbean Sea—and other nearby colonies—were a key locus of the British Empire. They were also a major source of wealth for Great Britain from the 17th century until the early 19th century. As historians have shown, the Atlantic trade furnishing slave labor for plantations was a generator of capital, enabling the British transition to an industrial economy. But the dependence of Caribbean colonies and the British government on slavery and the African slave trade was also a source of anxiety and national shame. A series of colonial rebellions, revolution in Haiti, and the rise of an antislavery movement in the United Kingdom culminated in the parliamentary prohibition of the trade in 1807 and the subsequent emancipation of all those enslaved in British colonies (passed in 1833, but not effective until 1838). By this law, reparative payments were made not to the enslaved but to their former “owners,” including many in the highest ranks of government. In subsequent decades, the British navy’s rebranding as an antislavery force ironically offered an alibi for colonization in Africa. Even as sugar production migrated elsewhere, rivalries with other imperial powers and the replacement of emancipated laborers by the transportation of South Asian workers kept the Caribbean closely entwined with the expanding British Empire. Complex struggles between local and imperial rule arose in the violent suppression of an 1865 uprising in Jamaica; the restriction of local self-governance; and the establishment of “free” trade networks bypassing the colonies. Long neglected in both histories of 19th-century British literature (as a distant outpost) and in Caribbean literature (as colonial, often expressing pro-slavery views), early anglophone Caribbean literature is now coming into the forefront, recognized as containing the seeds of a future Caribbean literature as well as major features of a globalizing Victorian literature. British writers of the 19th century repeatedly turned to “Creole” characters (those raised in the Caribbean) and West Indian settings to canvas not only geopolitics, but also sex, gender, race, class, labor, national governance, and ideas of freedom. Meanwhile, writers in the region developed distinctive perspectives. This entry focuses on anglophone writing in and about the Caribbean, although literary production in French and Spanish was more widespread in the region. This body of literature allows scholars and students to reckon with the legacies of slavery, the blurring of national and linguistic borders, and voices previously excluded or marginalized in the isolationist view of Victorian literature—including authors of African, South Asian, East Asian, Irish, Scottish, English, Jewish, and Indigenous descent in the anglophone Caribbean.