The Carribiean Nations - Focusing on Haiti Essay

The Carribiean Nations - Focusing on Haiti - Essay Example To put it simply, the history of the European colonization in the Caribbean tends to be a saga of economic exploitation and repression. There is no denying the fact that the dynamics of the agricultural dependency of the Caribbean is closely linked to the colonization of the Caribbean by the Europeans. The Europeans to a great extent reconfigured the financial potential of the Caribbean by introducing the plantation system (Parry, Sherlock & Maingot 18). It goes without saying that the human dynamics introduced in these plantations by the Europeans also to a great extent shaped the dynamics of the social hierarchy in the Caribbean. The arrival of the Europeans in the Caribbean and the shaping of the socio-economic landscape of the Caribbean by them through conquests and invasions to a large extent diluted the essentially cohesive world of the indigenous people of the Caribbean. Before the European colonization, the Caribbean predominantly happened to be a secluded place on the globe, being home to a simple, but rich and multifaceted civilization, to a large extent insulated from the machinations rampant in the outside world. However, the advent of the Europeans in the Caribbean exposed the indigenous civilization and people to the outer world, thereby making them subservient to the trends gushing in from Europe, America and Africa. As the tentacles of the European colonization began to expand their span in the Caribbean to plunder the native wealth of the region, they also brought in their wake a system of social hierarchy that assigned a specific place and scope to an individual on the basis of one’s race and position in a well entrenched system of economic exploitation (Parry, Sherlock & Maingot 122). As it is known that with the advent of the Europeans there unfolded an era marked by a sharp decline in the indigenous population, on most of the islands comprising the Caribbean, this indeed created a problem for the European settlers, who were perpetual ly looking for viable sources of affordable and docile labor, so as to optimally exploit the natural resources inherent in the region (Parry, Sherlock & Maingot 17). The solution that the Europeans contrived for this death of local labor eventually translated into the import of slaves from Africa (Parry, Sherlock & Maingot 17). There is no denying the fact that the advent of first the Europeans and then the Africans in the Caribbean, wrought out an utter transformation of the societies of the Caribbean. To begin with, the Caribbean people ended up being victims to a hoard of deathly and debilitating diseases and epidemics like measles, dysentery, malaria and smallpox, introduced to these hitherto isolated lands by the Europeans and the Africans who arrived as slaves (Parry, Sherlock & Maingot 10). The social and political norms and organizations of the indigenous people were reinvented and restructured in the name of spreading the good news. Christianity emerged as the single most p otent shaping influence in the socio-political framework of this part of the world (Parry, Sherlock & Maingot 130). The simple lives of the native people and the imported African slaves were stringently regimented by slavery, plantation culture and other institutions introduced by the Europeans, whose intentions were primarily commercial and profit oriented in their approach. (Parry, Sherlock