Caribbean Inequality within a World-Historical Context

Inequality is one of the most important problems in contemporary global and national politics, but the shape and trends of historical inequality at the global level are not well known outside of industrialized countries. This research attempts to study inequality in the Caribbean over the last two centuries within the context of global and transnational literature. First, the techniques used to study the industrialized world cannot be applied wholesale to the Caribbean because of the dearth of tax data. Second, historical data on Caribbean inequality must be assembled so that it is interoperable with other measures of inequality among countries and among world-citizens. Third, world-historical studies of inequality have privileged distributions of economic resources over other forms of nutritional, social, racial, or gender difference. Fourth, historians of inequality have been unable to successfully incorporate transnational migration into their narratives. These final points are unavoidable in a region like the Caribbean that is marked by high levels of racial difference and proportionally-large flows of both in- and out-migration. A longue durée narrative based on newly-assembled data on economic, social, and other forms of inequality in the Caribbean, complicates the traditional narratives of divergence and convergence in the world-historical literature.