The Early English Caribbean, 1570–1700 Vol 4

Carla Gardina Pestana · Sharon V Salinger

Dec 2021 · Routledge

About this eBook

This four-volume collection brings together rare pamphlets from the formative years of the English involvement in the Caribbean. Texts presented in the volumes cover the first impressions of the region, imperial rivalries between European traders and settlers and the experience of day-to-day life in the colonies. Volume 4: Making Meaning The flora and fauna of the islands and their economic potential was documented in a number of tracts which also helped to promote the colony as an attractive and bountiful place to settle. Running counter to the promotional literature was a whole sub-genre on natural disasters. Hurricanes and earthquakes were relatively common, and the commentators who wrote about them did so from a variety of motives: to entertain, to shock, to warn or simply to record them. Often portrayed as irreligious, settlers engaged energetically in the religious debates of the time. Dissenters were encouraged or coerced into leaving for the colonies and a number of Quaker publications condemned the transportation of their coreligionists. Though most settlers were members of the Church of England, its textual footprint was quite small and many more dissenting tracts have survived.

About the author

Carla Gardina Pestana is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World. Her research interests include American history, US religious history and the early modern world. She has received multiple awards, grants and fellowship, including first prize in 1987 for Liberty of Conscience and the Growth of Religious Diversity in Early America, 1636-1786 (1986) by the Rare Books and Manuscript Division of the ALA. Sharon V Salinger is Professor of History and Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of California - Irvine, where her interests include Early America, social history and gender. She is the author of Taverns and Drinking in Early America (2004) and more recently, the co-author of Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (2014).