Introduction: Caribbean counterpoints -- The Caribbean Stage Geographies of opportunity, geographies of constraint / Contemporary Caribbean ecologies: the weight of history / The earliest settlers / Old world precedents: sugar and slavery in the Mediterranean / The Making of a Colonial Sphere -- The Columbian moment: politics, ideology, and biohistory / From tainos to Africans in the Caribbean: labor, migration, and resistance / Negotiations of conquest / Toward sugar and slavery / Masterless people: maroons, pirates, and commoners / Colonial Designs in Flux -- The Caribbean between empires: colonists, pirates, and slaves / Imperial decline, colonial adaptation: the Spanish islands during the long 17th century / The Atlantic framework of 17th-century colonization / Servants and slaves during the 17th-century sugar revolution / The French and Dutch Caribbean, 1600-1800 / Slaves and tropical commodities: the Caribbean in the south Atlantic system / Capitalism, Slavery, and Revolution -- Slave cultures: systems of domination and forms of resistance / Rivalry, war, and imperial reform in the 18th-century Caribbean / The Haitian revolution / The abolition of slavery in the non-Hispanic Caribbean / Econocide? : from abolition to emancipation in the British and French Caribbean / Missionaries, planters, and slaves in the age of abolition / A Reordered World -- A second slavery? : the 19th-century sugar revolutions in Cuba and Puerto Rico / Peasants, immigrants, and workers: the British and French Caribbean after emancipation / War and nation building: Cuban and Dominican experiences / The rise of the American Mediterranean, 1846-1905 / The conundrum of race: retooling inequality / Africa, Europe, and Asia in the making of the 20th-century Caribbean / The New Empire -- Building U.S. hegemony in the Caribbean / The American sugar kingdom, 1898-1934 / Culture, labor, and race in the shadow of U.S. capital / Labor protests, rebellions, and the rise of nationalism during depression and war / Toward decolonization: impulses, processes, and consequences since the 1930s / The Caribbean and the cold war: between reform and revolution / The Caribbean in the Age of Globalization -- The long Cuban revolution / Independence and its aftermath: Suriname, Trinidad, and Jamaica / The colonial persuasion: Puerto Rico and the Dutch and French Antilles / An island in the mirror: the Dominican Republic and Haiti / Tourism, drugs, offshore finance, and the perils of neoliberal development / Caribbean migrations and diasporas