The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean

In this book, Tessa Murphy examines the cultural, political, and economic transformations of “the Creole Archipelago,” an interconnected island grouping composed of Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, and Tobago. Murphy successfully demonstrates how this space evolved into a “center of broader imperial experimentation and contestation” during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 4). However, this is not a story of imperial competition for political and commercial supremacy. Instead, Murphy persuades readers to rethink the history of the colonial Caribbean. Rather than portraying the Lesser Antilles as discrete national dominions, The Creole Archipelago recounts how these archipelagic borderlands were shaped by the interplay of Europeans, Indigenous Kalinagos, and free and enslaved African descendants. Murphy depicts the emergence of a culturally, politically, and religiously entangled archipelago connected to the Atlantic world but also molded by local dynamics and people. The author's meticulous analysis of multi-imperial sources from repositories in France, the...