Sheller's subject is the long habit of consuming the Caribbean, its sugar and its scenery, its bodies, its images, and by now its literature and theory. Her claim is that the practices that carried goods out of the islands under slavery never stopped, but changed shape.

She declines a purely geographical definition of the region, treating it instead as an effect and a set of practices as much as a place, denaturalized and renaturalized as paradise through maps, voyage accounts, botanical collecting and later through tourism and area studies. Travel writing is accordingly a central archive, read alongside the careers of the objects that crossed the Atlantic.

Chapters follow shifting views of Caribbean nature, the openness and vulnerability of the region's economies, its use for medical testing and pharmaceutical development, and the metropolitan academy's appetite for Caribbean writing. The argument is tied to the reparations debate that followed the Durban conference of 2001.