The Lesser Antilles: Beyond Beaches and Banks
The nations and cities surrounding the Caribbean Sea are some of the most unique in the world today, and some of the most important locations in modern history. Without Caribbean plantations, Europe and the West wouldn’t dominate the world economy today. Because of the legacy of the horrific slavery practices and colonialism of the plantation era, we have a cultural mishmash in the region that, regardless of its origins, is worth exploring. You have well-known cultural capitals like Havana, Jamaica, and New Orleans, but that’s only scratching the surface. This essay is about the Lesser Antilles, or the smaller islands that sit on the east side of the region (the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands are small but lie elsewhere in the Caribbean).
The Lesser Antilles are a chain of islands that stretch from just east of Puerto Rico to the coast of Venezuela, forming the Eastern edge of the Caribbean sea. Although larger, more populous Caribbean island nations like Jamaica and Cuba are well known, these countries and territories get less attention. That’s mostly because the average population of these island nations is around two hundred thousand, and most of them are tiny in terms of area; they’re the little…
