It is a book about the Caribbean, but also about the making of modernity itself.

Rather than treating the region as a holiday backdrop, a political afterthought, or a string of separate islands, Jelly-Schapiro reads it as one of the modern world’s great engines: a place shaped by empire, slavery, revolution, migration, language, music, race, and trade, and in turn shaping the world far beyond its shores.

He writes about Columbus, plantation economies, Toussaint Louverture, Fidel, tourism, exile, reggae, calypso, language politics, migration routes, New York, London, and Miami, but he keeps bringing it back to the lived texture of the islands themselves. 

This is a strong copy for readers interested in colonial history, Black Atlantic thought, diaspora, geography, and cultural criticism, but it is written with enough movement and clarity that it never feels like homework. Good for anyone who reads C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Édouard Glissant, Jamaica Kincaid, Stuart Hall, or books that try to understand how a region becomes a world-system rather than just a map location. 

2017 Canongate paperback edition. Very good overall, with light edge wear and a small crease/bump to the upper front corner.