The Caribbean Basin was the first place in the Western hemisphere to encounter the full force of European colonial development. No other part of the Americas was more diverse, more multinational, more polycultural than the Greater Caribbean. Consequently, its spatial history, as represented in maps–graphic visualizations of people, places, things, and ideas—is extraordinarily rich.

Islands are the heart of the Caribbean region. About 3,700 of them—those that are at least 1 square kilometer in size—constitute the core of this broad geographic area. The key Caribbean islands form an overall archipelago, a group or cluster, arranged in the shape of a half-moon arc that extends from Cuba in the northwest to Trinidad in the southeast, although the chain in most conceptualizations encompasses the Bahamian islands to the north and the islands off the Venezuelan coast to the south.

Still, the region includes not just the islands but rather all the lands that the Caribbean Sea touches physically and/or culturally. Thus the Venezuelan and Colombian coasts, the Guianas and Suriname, and the entire coast of Central America from Panama to the Yucatan can be considered part of a Caribbean basin or rimland. Another even larger regional conception, generally understood as a plantation zone where slavery was widespread, stretching from, say, Virginia in the north to Bahia in the south, accounts for what many see as a Greater Caribbean framework.

This project catalogs maps of the region, broadly conceived, from ca 1450 to ca 1850, that is, from the pre-encounter indigenous mapping traditions of Taíno and Carib natives, through European empire building, Afro-Caribbean and Asian-Caribbean contributions, to emergent nation-state construction.

Scattered among many archives and libraries–Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, Danish, Swedish, German, Italian, as well as in the United States—the sheer numbers of maps of this region or parts of it are remarkably varied and run into the tens of thousands. One goal of this project is to provide a comprehensive catalog of Greater Caribbean maps.

Chronology

Native collaboration was essential to early European mapping. The use of Indian names on maps is in part an index of the Indian contribution to cartographic knowledge and in part a measure of European appropriation and control. Natives not only provided spatial information to Europeans, but also shaped maps, literally by the sheer force of their presence. A notable feature of the earliest European maps of the Caribbean was the speed with which the Spanish drew the outline of the islands, aided by native informants even if tracking maps over time shows the progressive elision of most native place-names.

Perhaps the greatest shift in Caribbean mapmaking over the course of the early modern period involved a transition from littorals to interiors, from coastal outlines to mountains, from hydrography to topography. This was hardly a wholesale transformation: navigation was still the primary purpose of most maps; maritime charts were fundamental, so that even in the late eighteenth century most Caribbean maps were still of that type. Nevertheless, over time attention began turning to the land and to interiors—the source of all plantation wealth. Towns and fortifications also inspired many maps and plans; and their number grew rapidly over time, although navigational hazards, harbors, and channels vied for as much attention as street patterns, churches, hospitals, and road systems.

The Seven Years’ War was a critical watershed. Caribbean mapmaking became more intensive and extensive during this first truly global war.