From the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa María's deck in 1492 at what he mistook for an island in Asia, the Caribbean has been subjected to the misunderstandings and fantasies of outsiders, a region to be consumed or conquered. For more than 300 years, the Caribbean was victimized by the transatlantic slave trade, with societies shaped by mass migrations and forced labor. But as Joshua Jelly-Schapiro discusses in this history of "the place where globalization began," the Caribbean's people—scattered across a vast archipelago and separated by the languages of their colonizers—have nonetheless made an outsized contribution to the modern world's politics, religion, economics, music, and culture.