Award-winning historian, professor, and journalist Tao Leigh Goffe, launches an investigation of the Caribbean as the seat of corrupt Western wealth and environmental exploitation. When Christopher Columbus arrived on the Caribbean island of Guanahaní, it was remade, at least in mythology, as Eden. Since then, the Caribbean and its peoples have paid the price of relentless Western exploitation and abuses, falling prey to the planting of sugarcane and other cash crops. In Dark Laboratory, Goffe embarks on a historical journey into the influences that have made these islands-from Jamaica and Aruba to Cuba and Martinique-a target of Western capitalism and the foundation of the global economy as we know it today. Through the lens of personal and family memoir, as well as cultural and social history, Goffe seeks to radically transform how we conceive of Blackness, natural history, colonialism, and the climate crisis. Her writing considers the legacy of slavery and indentured servitude as Chinese laborers worked alongside enslaved Black people to excavate products like sugarcane and guano-in its day more valuable than gold-from these island nations. How can we combat contemporary racism and environmental degradation using the Caribbean and its dark history as guide? In autobiographical writing that shines light on both environmental upheaval and racial subjugation, Goffe offers solutions based on island ecologies, locating the origins of racism and the climate catastrophe in the colonization of the Caribbean. Her combination of personal narrative and research provides a record of the violence that has shaped these nations and a testament to our capacity for renewal.

A note on terminology -- Mountain ballads -- A map through the laboratory -- Lo Ting and Mami Wata-Garden interlude. Island laboratories; Climate crisis, genesis 1492; Natural history museums, shrines to explorers -- Geological time and Black witness. Breathing underwater; Guano destinies; Colonialism, the birder's companion guide; Life in the garden after Eden. The curious case of the Calcutta Mongoose in Jamaica; Pedagogies of smoke; Affective plate tectonics -- Coda: Burial at sea.