From Local to Global? Global Approaches to the Early Modern and Contemporary Greater Caribbean

Despite its multilingual and multicultural legacy, the historiography on the Greater Caribbean remains to a large extent fragmentary. At first glance, this might seem surprising given that any observer of the Caribbean past would agree that trans-national as well as global entanglement are two of its most outstanding features. Global history approaches thus seem to be a promising way to the rethinking of Caribbean history.
Although there had been several attempts to put Caribbean history in a wider context (i.e. Atlantic History) in the past, these calls have seldom led to a radical shift in historiography and to substantial empirical results. More often than not, most of these calls have led to nothing more than lip service by scholars. As a result, apart from the scholarship on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Greater Caribbean has remained largely absent from the global turn, which is dominating international historiography in the last two decades. There are of course several reasons for this: an often extreme fragmentation of sources, language and national barriers as well as different academic traditions and, last but not least, overspecialization.
The question thus remains, how to integrate the Greater Caribbean in a global perspective and thus enable the writing of a more inclusive history of the region? How can we overcome rather simplistic metropole/periphery models that dominate, for example, Imperial history? How can we include the Greater Caribbean’s global connections beyond the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in a new narrative? Which perspectives are most promising for such an endeavor? Finally, the question must also be asked, whether a global approach does not tend to marginalize local contexts in favor of global processes? Are (trans-)regional perspectives on Caribbean history maybe a more promising alternative?
This workshop seeks to explore these questions with the explicit aim to bring together specialists of diverse Caribbean areas to bridge historiographical traditions, language barriers, and historical subdisciplines. We particularly welcome contributions that engage with spatial categories, processes of colonization and decolonization, global warfare, nation- and state-building, identity construction, social as well as political and economic (trans)formations that help us make new sense of the Caribbean.