By Carrie Gibson
Review by Chris Hartman, February 23, 2015
Carrie Gibson’s thoughtful and extensively researched Empire’s Crossroads is a revelation. It is both a readable and in-depth study of the machinations of empire building in the so-called New World, as well as an account of the ravages of indigenous and displaced populations at the hands of European and American commercial interests. This account spares no quarter in exposing the sheer cruelty and inhumanity of European explorers and merchants toward the Caribbean’s native Amerindians and more recently arrived African slaves – as well as the legacy of this degradation, which haunts us still.
This book is notable not only for what it includes; but also in what it professes not to include. In an unusual series of admissions in the book’s introduction, Gibson notes with some humility, and not inconsiderable disappointment, that a number of important archives in the Caribbean and Central and South America have been irretrievably lost to natural disasters. She also demonstrates some of her own research shortcomings in focusing more intently on the Spanish Caribbean and the “Anglophone” islands – around which her own doctoral studies were based. She was not able to spend as much time in archives as she wanted, and admits that that trying to find original, unpublished sources can be a “needle-in-a-haystack” activity. Nevertheless, her study features over 40 pages of end notes, including both published and unpublished source material.
One of Gibson’s overarching motivations in enumerating the many deleterious exploits of these New World colonialists is her discomfort over the hunger and greed for sugar. She professes to “a nagging disquiet over the fact that so much of Caribbean history was transformed – deformed by the