Writing a book is a challenge in itself, but writing a book about the histories that emerge and shape societies in a geographic and cultural territory as complex as the Caribbean is even more difficult and risky. This new book is the result of successfully facing this challenge. The opening sentence condenses the dimension of its goal: “To tell the history of the Caribbean is to tell the history of the world” (1).

Dubois and Turits narrate the histories of the multiple nations of the Caribbean from the European conquest in the late fifteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. They discuss in detail the historical agency of indigenous people, Africans, and their descendants in the face of slavery, colonial oppression, United States imperialism, and the pressures of European powers and internal dilemmas throughout the twentieth century. Therefore, while guiding readers along routes to understanding how the Caribbean was shaped “by empires and plantation economies,” they also present it as a space for creating “new and more just ways of envisioning the world and the place of Caribbean individuals, communities, and nations within it” (5). Accordingly, they understand the history of the Caribbean from a perspective of “counter-plantation,” which intends to put epistemologies that would have emerged “from the visions and practices of the region's majorities” as central to understanding the social experiences of these societies.

The authors manage to construct a narrative and a historical argument that understands the histories of the Caribbean stitched together by the struggles for freedom and access to land, symbolizing both autonomy and independence in oppressive contexts. They place the Caribbean at the center of the world's debates about equality and modernity. This argument is supported by an important review of the literature, mixing classic works and more recent researches, and it is very well written. The authors' choice to gather references in notes at the end of long paragraphs, however, sometimes makes it difficult to follow the bibliographic references.

By bringing together coherently arguments and works about several nations and across five centuries, Dubois and Turits are able to reach both specialist readers and a wider audience. Thus, the book is an important contribution not only to Caribbean scholarship but to scholarship on other regions of the Afro-Americas, such as Brazil and the United States, as it promotes new possibilities for analytical approaches and the elaboration of new research questions, as well as supporting the development of actions to combat racism from an Atlantic perspective. The book highlights, even if only implicitly, how the struggles for freedom and access to land bring the social experiences of the Caribbean closer to those in the United States, Latin America, and Brazil from the colonial period to the present day.

Part 1 of the book explores the colonial Caribbean with emphasis on the history of freedom and emancipation, developed “both within and outside the plantation, conceived of and articulated by enslaved peoples imagining different futures, and whose actions, through rebellion, escape, and more, spurred on by the formal abolition of slavery” (4). At the same time, the authors effectively include indigenous populations in each of these processes of confronting colonial domination.

Part 2 deals with the independent Caribbean throughout the twentieth century. This period is understood in its tension articulation of empire, revolution, land control, autonomy, and resistance. Through this interpretative key, the authors analyze the constitution of independent nations, mainly Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, US imperialism in the region, the Cuban Revolution, and the social transformations at the end of the twentieth century.

However, with a gap concerning the independence processes of British and French colonies (except for Haiti), this narrative fails to debate the forms that nationalism and independence projects took in those countries. Despite this, by the end of the book the reader can understand in depth the argument that the histories of the Caribbean are rooted in a tradition of struggle for freedom, and how this is constantly represented by access to land. Freedom and land, consequently, share meanings around very important issues in Caribbean life, such as autonomy, family, community, and religion.

Dubois and Turits demonstrate that alternative paths and different futures were constantly tested and designed by Caribbean societies and they were “rounded in the experiences, practices, and hopes that have been created and sustained by Caribbean populations over centuries” (319). And those same experiences, practices, and hopes have been “misunderst[ood], overlook[ed], or silence[d]” (319) in histories across the region for a long time, as they are opposed to the hegemonic visions of land and freedom.

Dubois and Turits put before the reader a past of struggles for freedom and autonomy in the Caribbean—even though much of it has been violently crushed by colonial and imperial powers—and in doing so they inspire all the Americas to look at their indigenous and African roots and develop new and different projects for the future.