Caribbean

John Terraine describes how, in the months before Trafalgar, the French Fleet from Toulon was ordered to the West Indies, but Nelson was convinced that their real aim was Egypt.

S. Pollard discusses one of history's most controversial financial reformers.

For much of the British Civil Wars the colony of Barbados remained neutral, allowing both Parliamentarian and Royalist exiles to run their plantations and trade side by side. But with the collapse of the king’s cause in the late 1640s matters took a violent turn, as Matthew Parker relates.

Devastating earthquakes have been chronicled on the island of Hispaniola for the past 500 years, writes Jean-François Mouhot.

The West Indies is home to a large and vibrant South Asian population descended from indentured labourers who worked the plantations after the abolition of slavery. The arrival of the first, from Bengal in 1838, is recorded in the journal of a young doctor who accompanied them, as Brigid Wells describes.

David Abulafia considers Columbus’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, and shows how they challenged European preconceptions about what it meant to be human.

As Fidel Castro finally hands over the reins of power after forty-nine years, Michael Simmons finds his country poised between past and future.

Jane Bowden-Dan explores medical links between the Caribbean and London that throw important light on the position of blacks in eighteenth-century British society.

James Robertson investigates the Lord Protector’s ambitious plans for war with Spain in the Caribbean.

France officially commemorates the bicentennial of the death of a black French general, as Napoleon's prisoner, on April 7th, 1803.