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CARIBBEAN. The Caribbean is generally thought to include the Greater and Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, as well as the mainland French Guiana, Guyana (formerly colonial British Guiana), and Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) in South America, and the Central American nation of Belize (formerly British Honduras). It is a geographic nexus between Old and New Worlds, and as such has been global since its inception as a region. Boasting no distinguishable population of direct pre-Columbian descendants apart from a small Carib community in Dominica, its inhabitants are otherwise composed of a highly diverse ethnic and cultural mix of descendants from the Americas, Africa, Europe, and Asia.

Spain was the initial colonizer of the entire Caribbean, but contiguous Spanish settlement in the Caribbean was limited largely to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Still, one should talk of the Caribbean as a region distinct from Latin America. The Spanish Caribbean islands have been shaped by experiences similar to those of their non-Spanish neighbors. While their cultural connections to Latin America are apparent—in language, culture generally, and perhaps in political philosophy—their Caribbean experience of slavery, plantation agriculture, and the rise of peasantries accord more with the Antilles. It is food (sugar in particular, but also coffee, cocoa, citrus, spices, and bananas), and not language that culturally unifies the Caribbean as a region historically.

Caribbean food, like the people who have come to inhabit the region, is not homogeneous, nor can we accurately talk about an indigenous diet without accounting for the effects of the Columbian conquest of the Americas. There were indigenous American food plants and tobacco, but there were also scores of new cultivars, from Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as domesticated animals, which played a major role in the constitution of the region after 1492. But these two categories were not, however, isomorphic with the categories of domestically consumed and exported categories of post-conquest Caribbean food products. Instead, there are two categories of Caribbean food that better account for its history as a region. One encompasses those products that are responsible for constituting the region through a transatlantic system of trade. These products shape the way in which the region is defined by European and North American tastes. The other includes products grown as a direct response to the rigidities of this global system through culturally elaborated alternative systems of production, exchange, and consumption.

Repopulating the Region: Foundations of Exploration and Imperialism

Before the seventeenth century, the rights of Spain and Portugal to have colonial monopolies were established by several papal decrees issued in the fifteenth century. Inter Coetera of Pope Calixte III in 1456 gave Portugal the right to colonize lands "discovered" while circumnavigating Africa on South Asian exploration. Later bulls, for instance Inter Coetera II of Alexander VI in 1493, affirmed Spanish rights to colonization west of the Azores. Colonization rights, as conveyed by God's earthly representative, were in effect divided hemispherically. The 1493 Tordesillas Treaty, for instance, recognized Portuguese colonization rights up to 270 leagues west of the Azores, thus establishing Brazil as Portuguese but the rest of what is now regarded as the Caribbean and Latin America as Spanish (Mudimbe, 1995).

A common denominator in Spanish and Portuguese colonization should be noted. Rominus Pontifex, a papal bull of Nicolas V in 1454, is explicit that the central mission of colonization was proselytization. Non-Christians could be dispossessed of their lands under the doctrine of terra nullius (no man's land) or even killed for resisting conversion to Christianity. In fact, as Valentin Mudimbe has documented well in his study of these papal instruments, "if [colonial subjects] failed to accept the 'truth' and, politically, to become 'colonized,' it was not only legal but also an act of faith and a religious duty for the colonizers to kill the natives" (Mudimbe, 1995, p. 61). The grounding of New World colonization by the Spanish in such a religious dictum is responsible in part for the violent character of transatlantic contact, both in the Caribbean region and in mainland Latin America. Disease (particularly smallpox), genocide, and enslavement eliminated most of the indigenous populations of the larger settled islands by the end of the sixteenth century. Beginning in the seventeenth century, settlements by other European nations had a similar effect on the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles. Today, only the small eastern Caribbean island of Dominica boasts any bona fide "Carib" Indian population, amounting to no more than two thousand persons.

Spanish settlements had been established, mainly on the islands of Hispaniola and Cuba. A production system using Amerindian slave labor was attempted, but after subsequent failures, some slaves were imported from Africa. Still, within seventy-five years, these settlements had become largely peasant-oriented and insular. Spain had turned its attention to the mainland of Latin America, pursuing a policy of resource (particularly gold) extraction. In the early seventeenth century, various European nations began to challenge Spain's monopoly on colonization in the Americas on the grounds that many of the islands claimed by Spain were not, nor had they ever been, occupied by Spain. British, French, Dutch, Danish, and Swedish explorers began to settle the smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles. Though the colonizers differed, there was one common trait on these newly settled lands—the plantation.

The Sweet Taste of Colonialism

Columbus's inadvertent happening onto the Americas in 1492 is responsible for a shift of Europe's center from thalassic (focused on the Mediterranean Sea) to oceanic (focused particularly on the Atlantic) (Mintz 1991, p. 112). McNeill has noted the impact of this shift on Europe:

The principal historical impact of the American food crops, I suggest, was that they undergirded Europe's rise to world dominion between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. No other continent of the Old World profited so greatly. That was because Europe's climate, and especially its comparatively abundant rainfall, fitted the needs of the American food crops better than anywhere else, except China; and in China rice was so productive that the new crops had less to offer than potatoes and maize did in Europe" (McNeill, 1991, p. 52).

The Peruvian potato, for instance, was extraordinarily important to Europe, as it produced four times the caloric intake of rye bread. Potatoes never replaced grain completely: they do not store nearly as well as grain. But the efficient use of acreage is credited with population booms in Germany and Russia and the quick adoption of industry each experienced.

The constitution of an Atlantic epicenter is reflected not merely in the exchange of commodities between the Old and New Worlds. It is defined by the manner in which the demands made by Europe's growing populations were accommodated. Taste is essentially what defined the Caribbean as a region. The Caribbean provided a hospitable climate for the cultivation of sugar cane, particularly on the flatter, drier islands of the Antilles and coastal South America. The Spanish had initially developed sugar cane production in Cuba in the seventeenth century (Ortiz, 1947) but had not taken an interest in the mass production of the product. British colonization in the sixteenth century began to exploit sugar cane production using existing regional techniques, as well as methods learned from the Dutch occupation of Brazilian sugar estates. French interest in sugar production quickly followed and was equally influential by the eighteenth century. What was most significant about sugar was not the growing pancolonial interest in the cultivation of another New World commodity, but its rapid transformation from a luxury item to a sweet, tempting product demanded by a growing European working class: "…as sugar became cheaper and more plentiful, its potency as a symbol of power declined while its potency as a source of profit gradually increased" (Mintz, 1985, p. 95).

Production of sugar in the Caribbean multiplied to keep up with metropolitan demand. The need for a cheap source of physical labor led to the forced relocation of at least five million African slaves to the Caribbean during this same period. Revolts, slave maroonage (flight from plantations followed by the establishment of communities in remote terrains), and other forms of resistance both on the slave ships and in the colonies did little to slow European expansion of the sugar industry. In fact, at the time that Western Europe began to industrialize in the late eighteenth century, the importation of slaves to the Caribbean, particularly to the French colony of Saint-Domingue on the western third of the island of Hispaniola, was at its highest. Saint-Domingue was so valuable a colony to the French that at the Treaty of Paris they ceded their entire claim to Eastern Canada (now Quebec) in exchange for retaining it, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. During a protracted conflict of 1791 to 1803 in this colony, which in 1804 would be declared the republic of Haiti by revolting slaves, France and England both endured enormous military losses. France lost nineteen generals, including Leclerc, the husband of Napoleon's own sister Pauline, in the conflict. The "unthinkability" of losing the Haitian Revolution helps explain the silence on the subject in West European and American historiography (Trouillot, 1995). It was the profitability of Caribbean sugar colonies that had shaped the military and economic might of Europe generally and of France and England in particular.

Following the loss of Saint-Domingue, France retracted its New World interests, selling its remaining North American claims to the newly formed United States under the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Britain's interest in sugar cane production declined along with global prices in the late nineteenth century, as beet sugar production proved more profitable. Prior to its contraction, however, the British employed a number of labor management devices aimed at reducing the costs of labor on their plantations. Between the end of apprenticeship in 1838 and 1917, about 500,000 East Indians were brought, mainly as indentured laborers, into the Caribbean (Williams, 1970, p. 348). The cultural influence is particularly strong where the concentrations of Indians were highest, in Trinidad and Guyana. Chinese laborers were brought, particularly to Cuba. Javanese were brought to Surinam, and African indentured servants to the French West Indies as well.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba emerged as the dominant sugar producer in the Americas. Cuban reintegration into sugar production had begun following the British occupation of Havana in 1762 and the concomitant massive importation of slave labor into Cuba by enterprising merchants. Sugar production in Cuba essentially demonstrates an adaptation of the plantation system to a transition from mercantilist to capitalist interests in the New World. American merchant interests in the Cuban sugar industry developed throughout the nineteenth century and serve to explain, in part, American military intervention in the Cuban-Spanish War in 1898.

American military and financial involvement in Cuba thereafter typifies the manner in which foreign tastes shape the Caribbean's definition as an area in the twenty-first century. Rather than merely serving to satiate the European taste for sugar, the region has been used to satisfy new tastes: for sun, sex, and sin. The elimination of tropical diseases from the Caribbean by the early twentieth century, coupled with the devastation of Europe during World War I, made the Caribbean an attractive tourist destination. Casinos, brothels, and beaches were set up specifically to pander to North American and European interests.

A foreign traveler to the Caribbean is likely to come into contact with a broad range of dishes professing to be authentic in character. Most food produced for tourists reflects the particular tradition of transatlantic shipping from which these contemporary relations emerge: imported goods today compared to the dry provisions of the colonial period; Bacardi, yet another imported rum consumed over locally produced brands. Even the origins of the Daiquirí come from a drink that was consumed on slave ships to prevent scurvy: it was the name of the place where soldiers from the United States first tasted it (Ortiz, 1947, p. 25). As much as Europe's addiction to sugar defined the Caribbean culturally as a region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, so too does this new addiction affect it today. Even the concept of a Caribbean nation itself must endure the hungers of North American college students on spring breaks, en route to a "Bacardi Nation" that has petitioned for United Nations membership (Cohen, 1998).

Biting Back: Local Food Economies

Perhaps the most contentious debate among contemporary scholars of the Caribbean concerns the origins of the region's cultural influences. Many argue that African cultural influences define the region culturally (Herskovits, 1990; Brathwaite, 1993). Others have suggested the rigidities of the colonial system were so severe as to preclude the survival of any culture (Frazier, 1966). But one thing can be said about the Caribbean over any other region of the world. The Caribbean embodies all of the elements of what we today might call globalization: rapidity and movement of labor and capital; the amalgamation and negotiation of diverse and worldly cultural influences; and integral development of technology and communications. This, however, should not imply that the region is more culturally manufactured than other regions of the world, or that the late establishment of formal national or regional identities (beginning with the failed West Indies Federation from 1958–1962) is reflected in a lack of cultural distinctiveness. A few scholars have correctly noted that the Caribbean is best defined culturally through processes negotiated by its own inhabitants, and not determined by the mere movement of one or another traits from Europe, or Africa or Asia, to the region (Mintz and Price, 1992; Scott, 1991).

Inasmuch as the plantation system sought to define its inserted inhabitants in the Caribbean region as a monolithically defined production matrix, there were responses in the production, exchange, and consumption of food. Plantation owners were required by the late seventeenth century to provide rations to their slaves, but these tended to be inadequate. Slaves responded by establishing their own provision grounds adjacent to the plantations, on which they grew a wide range of products, not only for their own consumption but for sale as well (Mintz, 1978a; Mintz, 1978b; Gaspar, 1991; Mintz,1995). So important were these provision grounds that some even revolted to keep them. The 1831 abolition of the Sunday market for the barter and exchange of slave-produced goods in Antigua sparked uprisings and the burning of several plantations (Gaspar, 1991). During the early years of the Haitian Revolution, "the leaders of the rebellion did not ask for an abstractly couched 'freedom.' Rather, their most sweeping demands included three days a week to work on their own gardens and the elimination of the whip" (Trouillot, 1995, p. 103).

Often the surplus of these gardens was sold in slave markets, some reaching off-island destinations. Though the available historical record seems unwilling to acknowledge the fact, slaves were, in a strict sense internationally mobile. Market women ("hucksters" in the Eastern Caribbean, "higglers" in Jamaica, "Madan Sara" in Haiti) would traffic agricultural products both in local markets and to other islands in the region, either individually or through third parties. An eighteenth-century soldier's diary establishes that nonproduce, even manufactured items—including textiles, "syrup beer and a country drink called mawbey" (Aytoun, 1984, p. 28)—are being exchanged in local markets in the small Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica by these market women, and legitimated through the payment of an often hefty fee to their owners. The ability of the market women to meet this fee (rumored to be as much as a dollar and a half a week—an immense sum by the standards of the day) in cash payments suggests that slave markets were significantly broader than the historical record has typically suggested. Dry goods such as rice, wheat flour, beans, corn, and salted meats we know were imported, both from Europe and the United States, except during interruptions caused by the American Revolution. Similarly, a number of agricultural products were being cultivated on provision grounds: "ground provisions" (tubers, including yams, potatoes, dasheen, tannia, eddoes), citrus, bananas and plantains, breadfruit, cassava (the flour of which is used to make farina), and various herbs, used as a spice, for medicinal purposes, and in Obeah, Voudun, and other Afro-Caribbean religious ceremonies, particularly as a poison against slavemasters and in rebellions.

Until emerging national governments established and enforced customs regulations in the 1960s, the regional circulation of agricultural produce and dry provisions remained primarily a locally constituted economy. Ascendant merchants and entrepreneurs following emancipation began to formalize the importation of dry and canned goods in particular. Local agricultural products continue to have symbolic meanings that reflect the historic articulation of ground provision production with the transatlantic plantation system. In islands where certain agricultural products are abundant, it is not uncommon to see surpluses of certain products—bananas and breadfruit are common in the Eastern Caribbean for instance—given away rather than sold. Land, no matter how small in area, has enormous meaning "as a symbol of person-hood, prestige, security, and freedom for descendants of former slaves in the face of plantation-engendered land scarcity" (Besson, 1987, p.15). The South Asian and Far Eastern contemporary cultural and cuisine influences—for instance in the curry dishes, such as the roti associated with Trinidad, Guyana, and Jamaica but abundant through the Caribbean—are in fact the result of colonial responses to labor shortages on plantations following emancipation. British emancipation implemented a four-year period of apprenticeship designed to reorient slaves to wage labor. Yet freed slaves continued to demonstrate a stronger desire to work provision grounds.

An interesting case in which the attachment to provision grounds and transatlantic production intersect involves the emergence of the Eastern Caribbean banana economies from the 1950s onward. Bananas, produced mainly in Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and The Grenadines, and Grenada, were under exclusive license for sale to Britain during this period. Farmers, most of whom were cultivating plots of no more than a few acres, were required to produce exclusively for sale in British supermarkets in exchange for guaranteed markets. Trouillot has noted the reluctance of Dominican banana farmers to diversify their production cycles because of the symbolic qualities that bananas impart: "We can always eat our fig" was the response. While still green, bananas are a starch, and thus an excellent carbohydrate source. Green bananas (or "fig") are frequently used in local Caribbean cooking, as a porridge, used with other ground provisions in a stew (bouyon), or even used in certain festive cooking dishes, for instance in sankouche (with salted codfish, Creole, and curry seasonings). Bananas require about nine months to come to fruition, and the comparisons to a child's gestation period are sometimes invoked in the care of banana plants.

Gobbling Globalization and Globalization Gobbled

Despite an ideological commitment to local produce, and the proactivity of some small-scale producers, Caribbean tastes are hardly defined by some kind of peasant ethic or veneration of local products. Tubers, once key carbohydrates in the Caribbean diet, are declining in importance. And while even the most prototypical of Caribbean dishes have always to some extent been the product of a Creolization (blending) of locally grown products with imported items such as salted codfish, rice, and flour, imported items, particularly canned items, are gaining as status symbols. Former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley once lamented: "How can we build agriculture if our middle class believes it will surely rot if it can't buy tin mushrooms from abroad?" (Manley, 1988, p. 37). Monetary remittances from Caribbean persons living and working in more lucrative wage employment in Europe, Canada, and the United States has a long tradition in the Caribbean, and has been responsible for infusing cash into these economies. More recently, the remittance of actual packaged food products is becoming more prevalent (Palacio, 1991).

The retention of land, particularly for agricultural purposes, by small-scale producers and plantations alike, continues to be under threat, not just by hurricanes, agricultural diseases, and declining prices for many agricultural products, but by a growing nonagricultural sector. Plantations have declined in importance through most of the Caribbean during the last century, and, accordingly, many former estates have been sold off. Supplementing one's wages on a plantation with the maintenance of a provision garden has thus become increasingly difficult. Golf courses, mining expeditions, and hotel development not only acquire or degrade land, but draw Caribbeans into low-paying service-sector wage positions, making them "a stranger in we own land" (Pattullo, 1996). As labor has gradually been drawn out of the agricultural sector, and land for gardens is increasingly abandoned, sold, or not maintained, many Caribbean people have become increasingly reliant on wages in a highly volatile and unstable service sector to buy these packaged, imported food items.

Local cuisine in some ways has become increasingly foreignized, not merely by the inclusion of foreign products in Caribbean diets, which has always occurred in varying degrees, but through substantial changes in the ways in which Caribbean fare is internationally recognized. Foreign investment interests increasingly appropriate local cuisine for commercial purposes. Hotels throughout the Caribbean are notorious for hiring European chefs to cook "authentic" Caribbean dishes, which are often flashy reinterpretations or fusions of Caribbean fare—accras (fried codfish) are marked up as much as ten times in price in foreign owned restaurants for the mere addition of tartar sauce. And the local dishes historically consumed by Caribbean people are likewise affected by these changes. Fried chicken is now ubiquitous, so much so that Kentucky Fried Chicken is the only franchise on many of the more sparsely populated islands. The longest lines in any Caribbean capital will be at the fast-food chains. Locally, Ovaltine has far more cachet than the Blue Mountain Coffee of Jamaica sought by upper-class American consumers. And apart from national celebrations in which folk recipes predominate, most celebrations throughout the Caribbean are overcome by, as some complain, "rum and coke and smoke," the smoke being from the barbecue.

Despite the dramatic changes to Caribbean food through the postwar period of modernization and international development, local responses to these changes continue to be informed by an ongoing process of Creolization. Foreign phenomena continue to be incorporated into local dishes. Peleau (a specifically Creole dish, but ostensibly the same rice and beans–based dish found throughout the Caribbean) was once regarded in the Eastern Caribbean as a dish that usually included fish. Declining fishery production and the rapid growth of frozen chicken imports have changed the content but not the underlying Caribbean form. Caribbean food has established its distinctiveness historically by creatively and strategically incorporating diverse elements into a localized answer to the rigidities imposed by foreign consumer demands.

See also Africa; Banana and Plantain; Central America; France; Fruit; Iberian Peninsula; Potato; South America; United States: African American Foodways.

Jeffrey W. Mantz