Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0074/00741.txt

Text File | 1991-06-24 | 37KB | 590 lines

$Unique_ID{COW00741}
$Pretitle{233E}
$Title{Caribbean Commonwealth
Chapter 1A.   Regional Overview}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Franklin W. Knight}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{caribbean
islands
spanish
st
jamaica
sugar
region
english
arawaks
caribs}
$Date{1987}
$Log{Dog's Head*0074101.scf
Statue of Columbus*0074103.scf
Kingston Harbour*0074104.scf
}
Country:     Caribbean Commonwealth
Book:        Caribbean Commonwealth, An Area Study: Introduction
Author:      Franklin W. Knight
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1987

Chapter 1A.   Regional Overview

[See Dog's Head: Arawak carving of a dog's head from a conch shell.]

     The Commonwealth Caribbean Islands have a distinctive history.
Permanently influenced by the experiences of colonialism and slavery, the
Caribbean has produced a collection of societies that are markedly different
in population composition from those in any other region of the world.

     Lying on the sparsely settled periphery of an irregularly populated
continent, the region was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492.
Thereafter, it became the springboard for the European invasion and domination
of the Americas, a transformation that historian D.W. Meinig has aptly
described as the ""radical reshaping of America."" Beginning with the Spanish
and Portuguese and continuing with the arrival more than a century later of
other Europeans, the indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced a series
of upheavals. The European intrusion abruptly interrupted the pattern of their
historical development and linked them inextricably with the world beyond the
Atlantic Ocean. It also severely altered their physical environment,
introducing both new foods and new epidemic diseases. As a result, the native
Indian populations rapidly declined and virtually disappeared from the
Caribbean, although they bequeathed to the region a distinct cultural heritage
that is still seen and felt.

     During the sixteenth century, the Caribbean region was significant to the
Spanish Empire. In the seventeenth century, the English, Dutch, and French
established colonies. By the eighteenth century, the region contained colonies
that were vitally important for all of the European powers because the
colonies generated great wealth from the production and sale of sugar and
other tropical staples.

     The early English colonies, peopled and controlled by white settlers,
were initially microcosms of English society, in which small yeomen farmed
economies based mainly on tobacco and cotton. A major transformation occurred,
however, with the establishment of the sugar plantation system. To meet the
system's enormous manpower requirements, vast numbers of black African slaves
were imported throughout the eighteenth century, thereby reshaping the
region's demographic, social, and cultural profile. Although the white
populations maintained their social and political preeminence, they became a
numerical minority in all of the islands. Following the abolition of slavery
in the 1830s, the colonies turned to imported indentured labor from India,
China, and the East Indies, further diversifying the region's culture and
society. The result of all these immigrations is a remarkable cultural
heterogeneity in contemporary Caribbean society.

     The abolition of slavery was also a watershed in Caribbean history in
that it initiated the long, slow process of enfranchisement and political
control by the nonwhite majorities in the islands. The early colonies enjoyed
a relatively great amount of autonomy through the operations of their local
representative assemblies. Later, however, to ease administration and to
facilitate control of increasingly assertive colonial representative bodies,
the British adopted a system of direct administration known as crown colony
government (see Glossary), in which British-appointed governors wielded nearly
autocratic power. The history of the colonies from then until 1962, when the
first colonies became independent, is marked by the rise of popular movements
and labor organizations and the emergence of a generation of politicians who
assumed positions of leadership when the colonial system in the British
Caribbean eventually was dismantled.

     Despite shared historical and cultural experiences and geographic,
demographic, and economic similarities, the Caribbean islands of the former
British Empire remain diverse, and attempts at political federation and
economic integration both prior to and following independence have foundered.
Thus, the region today is characterized by a proliferation of ministates, all
with strong democratic traditions and political systems cast in the
Westminster parliamentary mold, but all also with forceful individual
identities and interests.

Geographic Setting

     The Commonwealth Caribbean islands make up a large subcomponent of the
hundreds of islands in the Caribbean Sea, forming a wide arc between Florida
in the north and Venezuela in the south, as well as a barrier between the
Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean (see fig. 1). Varying considerably in
size, the islands, which are the isolated upper parts of a submerged chain of
volcanic mountains, are scattered over thousands of square kilometers of sea.
The entire region lies well within the northern tropics.

     The three principal geological formations found throughout the Caribbean
are igneous and metamorphic rocks, limestone hills or karst, and coastal,
sedimentary plains of varying depths, resulting in three prevailing kinds of
topography, found either separately or in combination. The first consists of
high (over 1,200 meters), rugged, sharply dissected mountains--such as the
Blue Mountains in eastern Jamaica, the Morne Diablotin in central Dominica,
Mount Soufriere in St. Vincent, and the Northern Range in Trinidad--covered
with dense, evergreen rain forests and cut by swiftly flowing rivers. The
second kind of topography consists of very hilly countryside, such as the high
plateau of central Jamaica, or the terrain on the islands of Antigua and
Barbados. There, the hills seldom rise above 600 meters and are more gently
sloped than the high mountains, but karst areas are still rugged. The third
kind of topography consists of the coastal plains skirting the hills and
mountains; their greatest extensions are usually on the southern or western
sides of the mountains. Active volcanoes exist in Dominica, St. Vincent, and
St. Lucia, and there are crater lakes formed by older activity in Grenada. All
the islands have rugged coastlines with innumerable inlets fringed by white or
dark sands (depending on the rock substratum) of varying texture. The beaches
of Negril in Jamaica and Grand Anse in Grenada have fine- textured white sands
that extend for nearly eleven kilometers each.

     The Caribbean climate is tropical, moderated to a certain extent by the
prevailing northeast trade winds. Individual climatic conditions are strongly
dependent on elevation. At sea level there is little variation in temperature,
regardless of the time of the day or the season of the year. Temperatures
range between 24C and 32C. In Kingston, Jamaica, the mean temperature is
26C, whereas in Mandeville, at a little over 600 meters high in the
Carpenters Mountains of Manchester Parish, temperatures have been recorded as
low as 10C. Daylight hours tend to be shorter during summer and slightly
longer during winter than in the higher latitudes. Rather than the four
seasons, the conventional division is between the long rainy season from May
through October and the dry season, corresponding to winter in the Northern
Hemisphere.

     Even during the rainy period, however, the precipitation range fluctuates
greatly. Windward sides of islands with mountains receive a great deal of
rain, whereas leeward sides can have very dry conditions. Flat islands receive
slightly less rainfall, but the pattern is more consistent. For example, the
Blue Mountains of eastern Jamaica record around 558 centimeter