History of the Caribbean in the context of Spanish conquest of the Inca empire

⭐ Core Definition: History of the Caribbean

The history of the Caribbean reveals the region's significant role in the colonial struggles of the European powers since the 15th century. In the modern era, it remains strategically and economically important. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean and claimed the region for Spain. The following year, the first Spanish settlements were established in the Caribbean. Although the Spanish conquests of the Aztec empire and the Inca empire in the early sixteenth century made Mexico and Peru more desirable places for Spanish exploration and settlement, the Caribbean remained strategically important.

From the 1620s and 1630s onwards, non-Hispanic privateers, traders, and settlers established permanent colonies and trading posts on the Caribbean islands neglected by Spain. Such colonies spread throughout the Caribbean, from the Bahamas in the northwest to Tobago in the southeast. Furthermore, during this period, French, Dutch, and English buccaneers settled on the island of Tortuga, the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola (Haiti and Dominican Republic), and later in Jamaica as well as the island of Martinica.

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⭐ Core Definition: History of the Caribbean
History of the Caribbean in the context of Afro-Caribbeans
History of the Caribbean in the context of British African-Caribbean people

History of the Caribbean in the context of Afro-Caribbeans

Afro-Caribbean or African Caribbean people are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Sub-Saharan Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans (primarily from West and Central Africa) taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro- or Black West Indian, or Afro- or Black Antillean. The term West Indian Creole has also been used to refer to Afro-Caribbean people, as well as other ethnic and racial groups in the region, though there remains debate about its use to refer to Afro-Caribbean people specifically. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.

People of Afro-Caribbean descent today are largely of West African and Central African ancestry, and may additionally be of other origins, including European, Chinese, South Asian and Amerindian descent, as there has been extensive intermarriage and unions among the peoples of the Caribbean over the centuries.

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History of the Caribbean in the context of British African-Caribbean people

British African-Caribbean people or British Afro-Caribbean people are an ethnic group in the United Kingdom. They are British citizens or residents of recent Caribbean heritage who further trace much of their ancestry to West and Central Africa. This includes multi-racial Afro-Caribbean people.

The earliest generations of Afro-Caribbean people to migrate to Britain trace their ancestry to a wide range of Afro-Caribbean ethnic groups, who themselves descend from the disparate African ethnic groups transported to the colonial Caribbean as part of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. British African Caribbeans may also have ancestry from European and Asian settlers, as well as from various Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. The population includes those with origins in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, The Bahamas, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Barbados, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Lucia, Dominica, Montserrat, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Cayman Islands, Anguilla, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, Belize, and elsewhere.

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