Like marine life washed up on a beach, most Caribbean peoples have been brought where they are by powerful forces outside their control. These forces include colonialism, slavery, and revolution, processes in the seventeenth and eighteenth century that convulsed Europe and whose effects spread to much of the rest of the world. Just as tidepools a few feet apart can have completely different sets of animal and plant life, Caribbean islands just a few miles apart can have completely different histories and mixtures of peoples. Mirroring the complexity of the life in these tidepools, there are myriad interpretations of the effects of different historical, structural, cultural and other factors on the region. Stephen Glazier has selected a set of articles received from a call for papers placed in newsletters of the Caribbean Studies Association and the American Anthropological Association
