Dubois and Turits begin where most Caribbean histories hurry past. The indigenous peoples of the islands have been told they were vanishing for five hundred years and have not vanished, surviving in descendants who claim the identity and in lifeways, crops and practices that outlasted invasion. The authors take up Melanie Newton's point that aboriginal disappearance was a founding imperial myth, one that persisted even in twentieth-century anticolonial writing, and they follow the Garifuna from St Vincent into Central America and beyond.

The plantation follows, treated as an anomaly rather than a norm. Nowhere else had the enslaved formed eighty-five or ninety per cent of a population, and nowhere had slavery been so thoroughly racialised, with indentured European labour abandoned in favour of Africans and their children.

They trace the system from early Spanish sugar in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico through the British and French colonies to the Cuban boom that followed Haitian independence.