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Florida Book Awards, Bronze Medal for General Nonfiction International Latino Book Awards, First Place, Best History Book (English) Scholarly and popular attention tends to focus heavily on Cuba’s recent history. Key to the New World is the first comprehensive history of early colonial Cuba written in English, and fills the gap in our knowledge of the island before 1700.
"Beginning with Batista's coup in 1952, which catalyzed the rebels, and concluding with present-day transformations initiated under Raúl Castro, Revolutionary Cuba provides a balanced analytical synthesis of all the major topics of contemporary Cuban history"--
This volume presents a social history of life in mid-19th-century Cuba as experienced by George Backhouse (and his wife, Grace), who served on the British Havana Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade. Documented with extracts from the Backhouse's correspondence, diaries and other contemporary papers, Martinez-Fernandez paints a detailed picture of the Cuban slave trade, its role in the sugar industry, and the interrelated contradictions within Cuba's economy, society and politics. The Backhouse story provides addition al insights into important aspects of life in the "male" city of Havana, social antagonisms between Britons and North Americans, interactions with European social circles, religious tension, and the reality of tropical disease. Drama is added to the narrative in the author's description of the tragic and mysterious murder of George Backhouse in August 1855, possibly the result of a slave traders' conspiracy.
This in-depth, comparative study focuses on the economy, society, and political culture of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Viewing developments as they relate to the countries' common heritage of insularity, colonialism, and slavery, Luis Martínez-Fernández points out profound, underlying balance-of-power transformations during a time of ostensibly small change in the region's political status.
This book provides a generalised approach to fractal dimension theory from the standpoint of asymmetric topology by employing the concept of a fractal structure. The fractal dimension is the main invariant of a fractal set, and provides useful information regarding the irregularities it presents when examined at a suitable level of detail. New theoretical models for calculating the fractal dimension of any subset with respect to a fractal structure are posed to generalise both the Hausdorff and box-counting dimensions. Some specific results for self-similar sets are also proved. Unlike classical fractal dimensions, these new models can be used with empirical applications of fractal dimension...
An “illuminating” survey of Caribbean history from pre-Columbian times to the twenty-first century (Los Angeles Times). Combining fertile soils, vital trade routes, and a coveted strategic location, the islands and surrounding continental lowlands of the Caribbean were one of Europe’s earliest and most desirable colonial frontiers. The region was colonized over the course of five centuries by a revolving cast of Spanish, Dutch, French, and English forces, who imported first African slaves and later Asian indentured laborers to help realize the economic promise of sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples offers an authoritative one-volume survey...
A thorough examination of the history of the controversial island country looks at little-known aspects of its past, from its pre-Columbian origins to the fate of its native peoples, complete with up-to-date information on Cuba's place in a post-Soviet world.
Catholicism has long been recognized as one of the major forces shaping the Hispanic Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic) during the nineteenth century, but the role of Protestantism has not been fully explored. Protestantism and Political Conflict in the Nineteenth-Century Hispanic Caribbean traces the emergence of Protestantism in Cuba and Puerto Rico during a crucial period of national consolidation involving both social and political struggle. Using a comparative framework, Martínez-Fernández looks at the ways in which Protestantism, though officially "illegal" for most of the century, established itself, competed with Catholicism, and took differing paths in Cuba ...
"Impressive. . . . Some of the book's most salient contributions are the conclusions about the origins of the slaves, the relative importance of the Caribbean trade vis-a-vis the African trade, comparisons between Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the inner workings of the slave trade. In all these areas the author offers fresh perspectives based on new materials."--Luis Martinez-Fernandez, Rutgers University Drawing on archival sources from six countries, Joseph Dorsey examines the role of Puerto Rico in slave acquisitions after the traffic in slaves was outlawed. He delineates the differences between Puerto Rican and non-Puerto Rican traffic, from procurement in West Africa to influx into the Cari...
Critically drawing on recent theorizations of post-structuralism, feminism, critical criminology, subaltern studies, and post-coloniality he examines the mechanisms through which colonized subjects become recognized, contained, and represented as subordinate.