The Silver Women argues that Black West Indian women made the construction of the Panama Canal possible by providing the indispensable everyday labor of social reproduction. The book links this labor to the histories of U.S. imperial infrastructure, the global Caribbean diaspora, and women’s own survival.

Focusing on the lived experiences of British colonists, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans, The Invention of Rum shows how people engaged in making and consuming this commodity created a new means of profit that transformed the Atlantic world.

The Predatory Sea explores the deeply entangled histories of captivity and colonialism in the greater Caribbean between 1570 and 1670. Casey Schmitt explicates the captive economy that shaped English and French colonization, inter-imperial competition, and the lived experiences of captives and their captors during this violent century.

Captives of Conquest is one of the first books to examine the earliest indigenous slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean. Erin Woodruff Stone shows how upwards of 250,000 people were removed through slavery, a lucrative business that formed the foundation of economic, legal, and religious policies in the Spanish colonies.

Examining island-wide and diasporic literary and cultural productions from 1791 to 2002, Sophie Maríñez challenges the “fatal conflict” paradigm dominating views of the relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic through the framework of the Spiral, a concept at the core of Spiralism, a Haitian literary aesthetic developed in the 1960s.

By approaching the colonial Caribbean as an interconnected region, Tessa Murphy recasts small islands as the site of broader contests over Indigenous dominion, racial belonging, economic development, and colonial subjecthood.

Boundaries of Belonging shows how, in an early modern Caribbean of overlapping and contested borders, a mobile and diverse population that included pirates, smugglers, freedom seekers, and religious refugees, influenced theories of imperial belonging and interpolity law.