The Greater Caribbean Region

Our research for Connecting Threads has shown that Indian textiles, and in particular Madras handkerchiefs, were traded to and worn in different parts of the Caribbean. In order to include the islands as well as the coastline areas, such as Louisiana in the United States, and the Guianas in South America, we have referred to the region as the Greater Caribbean. We know Madras handkerchiefs were historically used in many parts of the region, including in Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Demerara, Dominica, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Jamaica, Louisiana (USA), Martinique, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Virgin Islands. While these sites cannot be said to represent all of the Caribbean, we see extensive use of Madras textiles in the region, particularly in areas that were part of what is referred to as the ‘plantation zone,’ where populations of enslaved people were greatest in number.

Emanuel Bowen, "An Accurate Map of the West Indies," 1740, printed in London, England.
For more historical maps of the Greater Caribbean see Greater Caribbean Mapping, 1450 – 1850.

The name ‘Caribbean’ is derived from the name of a group living in the islands of the Caribbean that was identified by European colonisers as the ‘Caribs.’ This Indigenous group called themselves Kalinago, and the word ‘Carib’ itself derives from the Taíno language, a language spoken widely in the Caribbean prior to European colonisation. Europeans first arrived in the Caribbean in 1492. Christopher Columbus’ ship landed on what he called the island of Hispañola and is today divided into two countries: Dominican Republic and Haiti. Columbus’ arrival changed the trajectory of the region, and of the world. As in other parts of the Americas, the Indigenous populations on the islands in the Caribbean were severely decimated by European colonialism. From the sixteenth century onwards, migration from Europe and the forced migration of people from Africa, changed the social and cultural makeup of the region. In the nineteenth century, indentured labourers from Asia also joined the social fabric of many countries in the Caribbean.

Connecting Threads focuses mostly on the colonial period in the Greater Caribbean, specifically the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when various European powers were controlling different parts of the region. Our research centred on French and British colonies in the Caribbean where the French and British East India Companies were supplying other merchants with Indian cotton textiles. The earliest record we have found specifically showing the trade of Madras handkerchiefs is a French record from 1739. We do see a preponderance of use of Madras handkerchiefs in the former French colonies of the Caribbean, including Louisiana in the US, suggesting the French played a significant role in supplying these textiles to the region. Other European powers, the Danish, the Dutch, and the Spanish, also traded checked textiles from South India and supplied them to consumers in the Caribbean. However, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the British dominated this trade as both South India and significant parts of the Caribbean came under the control of the British Empire.

The project also focuses especially on the population of African descent in the region, who were the ones who used Madras handkerchiefs and popularised them. While some people of African descent joined the expeditions of the early colonisers, great numbers of people from Africa were forcefully brought to the Caribbean from the early sixteenth century onwards. Amongst the eleven million African peoples who survived the Middle Passage, almost five million were brought to the Greater Caribbean Region and the majority laboured on plantations for crops such as sugar, tobacco, coffee, indigo and cotton. African children, women, and men would also do household work and ranching.

The people of African descent in the Caribbean were not a homogenous group, even if they shared certain cultural practices, such as the use of headwraps. The use of headwraps, and in particular the taste for checked textiles to tie headwraps, is thought to come from West Africa, which was the original home of most enslaved people. Once in the Caribbean, enslaved children, women and men had very difficult lives, but some did manage to gain freedom. Many enslaved people married or had children with Indigenous or European people, which meant that there was a significant mixed-race population in the region as well. This diversity amongst the people of African descent is seen in the textual record and represented in the artwork from the eighteenth century, albeit problematically. Italian painter, Agostino Brunias, depicts both enslaved and free women of colour partaking in the sale of textiles and wearing Madras. According to Brunias, even the famed Garifuna chief, Joseph Chatoyer, and his associates, wore Madras kerchiefs (the Garifuna are a people of mixed Indigenous and African ancestry).

Paintings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries depicting women from the region refer to them as ‘creoles,’ which in the Caribbean context meant that they were born in the Caribbean and could be of African or European descent or mixed race (unlike in colonial Spanish America where criollo specifically referred to people of European descent born in the Americas.) Over time the word ‘creole’ has come to represent a mixing of cultures, or the formation of a new culture or language, from the merging of several different ones. This term and concept is also something that can be seen to unite the Greater Caribbean Region, where the different islands and coastal areas have developed their own creole cultures and languages, but are united by having gone through a process of creolisation. The use of the Madras handkerchiefs in the region is an example of this phenomenon. In different places in the Caribbean preferences for colour vary and the headwraps are tied in different ways, even referred to by different names, but Madras as a marker of cultural identity continues to be popular across many parts of the region.