Warwick University Caribbean Studies Paradise Overseas - Softcover

"Paradise Overseas" presents a tour around the main themes of Dutch Caribbean history and its contemporary legacies. Drawing on wide expertise in Caribbean and Latin American studies, Gert Oostindie strongly posits a refreshing analysis of the Dutch Caribbean in a comparative framework which will be of interest to historians, anthropologists and political scientists alike. Rather than aiming at a comprehensive narrative, he offers a thematic discussion of topics such as the contrasts between Dutch colonization in the Americas and Asia; African slavery, Asian indentured labour and the shaping of plural societies in the Dutch Caribbean; the major contrasts between and within the six Antillean islands and Suriname; the different trajectories of decolonisation and their subsequent costs and benefits; and the changing significance of ethnicity and national identity both in the Dutch Caribbean and its diaspora.

Professor Gert Oostindie is Director of the KITLV/Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in the Netherlands and is Professor at Utrecht University. He has extensively researched the social and economic history of the Caribbean from a comparative perspective, with a focus on slavery, decolonisation, ethnicity and migrations.