Download or read book The Early English Caribbean, 1570-1700 written by Carla Gardina Pestana and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By the end of the seventeenth century, the English participated energetically in and thought deeply about the West Indies, a drastic change from their minimal involvement and imperfect knowledge of the 1560s. In the mid-sixteenth century the Spanish monopolized the Caribbean Sea, and prohibited all others access to it. Those Englishmen and women who sought to learn about it consulted a limited number of texts that had been produced in other languages; such knowledge was the purview of the elite. That situation changed on both fronts. Direct experience came as English people travelled to the West Indies and began to stake claims on lands there, while broader awareness increased as interested booksellers and writers translated foreign language texts or composed new accounts. These four volumes chart the changing engagement in the West Indies on the part of the English both as adventurers (to use the early modern term for those who 'ventured' their lives or fortunes) and as translators, writers and publishers. The centrality of the region to the growing English commitment to the wider world can be followed in the proliferation of a variety of texts that earned publication over the thirteen decades from the 1570s and the 1690s"--Introduction.