Blood Waters: War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean (Studies in Early Modern Cultural #39) (Hardcover)

Blood Waters: War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean (Studies in Early Modern Cultural #39) By Nicholas Rogers Cover Image
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Description


This book paints a picture of the eighteenth-century British Caribbean as a frontier zone in which war, international rivalry, disease and slavery are paramount themes. It explores the lure of the region as a vaunted site of potential wealth and derring-do, the fragility of tropical campaigns, the nature of slave insurrection, and the efforts of indigenous peoples (here, the Miskito of the Mosquito Coast and the Black Caribs of St Vincent) to carve out some autonomy from the British and Bourbon powers. It also explores the mutiny of a slave-ship and its unsuccessful raiding ventures in order to show how the dominant European powers sought to contain piracy in an expanding plantation complex. The book emphasizes the contrarieties of struggle, the difficulties preventing subaltern groups, whether slaves, free blacks, indigenous peoples or soldiers and sailors, from forging broader alliances, and the importance of tropical disease in shaping military outcomes. It warns against romanticizing resistance in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, showing that it was instead a 'marchlands' in which violence was a way of life and where solidarities were transitory and highly volatile.

NICHOLAS ROGERS is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in History at York University, Toronto and author of Murder on the Middle Passage. The Trial of Captain Kimber (Boydell, 2020) and (with Steve Poole) of Bristol from Below. Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City, (Boydell, 2017).
Product Details
ISBN: 9781783276233
ISBN-10: 1783276231
Publisher: Boydell Press
Publication Date: June 18th, 2021
Pages: 246
Language: English
Series: Studies in Early Modern Cultural