British Colonial Landscapes of the Outer Caribbean

Shifting political fortunes in the Americas repeatedly forced the British Crown to implement strategies for managing its subject populations. These strategies pushed colonization to ever widening peripheries, transforming natural and cultural landscapes in novel ways. New settlements were established for the purposes of extracting resources, commanding trade, and expanding military authority. These ventures involved the negotiation of power relations between and among colonizers, indigenous societies, and enslaved Africans. Recent archaeological studies examine plantations, outposts, and other built environments of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were peripheral, both geographically and economically, to the more profitable sugar colonies of the Greater and Lesser Antilles. These studies highlight the importance of the material record to understanding social dynamics and globalizing processes within the wider sphere of the Caribbean under British control.