There is a phenomenon in some sectors where science is seen as beyond social influence – that scientific fact is inherently “objective” and beyond social influence. To a degree this is true: there is an objective reality — there must be for our science to work — however science is also a social process. It is influenced, and in turn influences the social. Whether one likes it or not, to do science is to be also engaged in political activity. I do not mean that every scientist is inherently an activist. However, there is an emancipatory aspect to explanatory work, and what questions are thought to be worth asking and which are prioritised is inherently political. Those who claim that science is wholly objective, separate from the social and political, are themselves taking a political position.

Inasmuch as geography is a science, it is not immune to this, and aspects of geography can and are contested for social and political reasons. This is perhaps most clear to many of us in 2025 with how the United States has attempted to rename the Gulf of Mexico by imperial fiat. The gulf itself has not technically changed, of course, however we cannot deny that its geography, in a symbolic sense, is now contested. The same also applies to the contested nature of the Caribbean — what is it and what is included in it. Depending on how one chooses to define or frame one’s geography determines how one perceives the Caribbean. And this is inherently a political act.

In a narrow definition of the term, the Caribbean would include only those areas which literally touch the body of water we have collectively called the Caribbean Sea. By this definition, Bermuda and the Lucayan archipelago — which consists of essentially Bahamas and Turks & Caicos — are not technically within the Caribbean. They border on the one hand the Atlantic, and on the other hand a body of water between them and the Antilles — which themselves border the Caribbean Sea on their southern coasts.

Some would also dispute whether those countries of South America and Central America that have coasts on the Caribbean Sea are Caribbean. Others might quibble that the Spanish-speaking islands of Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico should be considered part of the Caribbean or Latin America. Some might even argue that only the English-speaking areas are of the Caribbean. Thus, we see how the “Caribbean” may become a contested zone based on linguistic geographies or by questions of being islands or part of the mainland.

There are other ways to frame geography, of course. From a biological point of view — biogeography, to be exact — if one is to define the Caribbean based on a common ecology, then, yes, the Bahamas, Turks & Caicos and Bermuda are all considered part of the Caribbean bioregion in terms of a shared flora, fauna and even mycobiota (plants, animals and fungi respectively). Florida is also considered part of this bioregion. Of course, there are variations: Bermuda, being on the periphery of the bioregion, and also relatively small, has a reduced rate of biodiversity relative to, say, Jamaica.

Another type of geography is cultural, and, yes, Bermuda does distinctly fall within the sociocultural region of the Caribbean. Much of our population shares familial and cultural traits with other Caribbean islands, with some more prominent than others. For example, there are many people in Bermuda who can trace their ancestry to Jamaica or various other islands such as St Kitts & Nevis, and key figures from our history, such as E.F. Gordon, are of Trinidadian history.

One might also apply a frame of political geography, and, yet again, Bermuda falls distinctly within the Caribbean region, as a small-island nation, and also shared constitutional histories — our own constitution is not greatly different from the constitutions of much of the Anglo-Caribbean.

One might also apply economic geography, and again Bermuda falls into the Caribbean region from this perspective. While we never had a fully developed plantation system to the extent of the sugar plantations of Barbados or Jamaica, we still had our plantations of tobacco and arrowroot, while more widely we have a de facto plantation economy, one notable in our economic dependency to the imperial core and resting on one or two economic pillars.

In Bermuda’s case, despite the romanticism of piracy, our actual economic importance has been largely one of a military garrison, upon which tourism was constructed — originally based on aristocratic American families sending their daughters here to wed eligible British military officers — and later international business.

Of course, one cannot deny our shared history of slavery. As noted, we did not necessarily have the plantations that largely frame the imagery of slavery in the Caribbean; however, we had slavery all the same, with all its horrors and inhumanity. Indeed, we have the dubious history of being one of the first of the English colonies to have enslaved Africans, with the Treasurer of Warwick in the summer of 1619 landing the first enslaved Africans in the colony to work on Warwick’s plantations — what is today Warwick Parish.

To be clear, I refer only to the first enslaved Africans under the English colony. And, while Bermuda was uninhabited in 1609, that did not mean we avoided the horrors of the enslavement of Indigenous people, both from the other islands and from what is now the US. Similarly, we share a common history of a liberation struggle with the rest of the Caribbean, with resistance against enslavement and imperialism throughout our history.

Ultimately, the decision by some to deny our Caribbean identity is a political decision to narrow the definition of what is and what isn’t the Caribbean. And this is not unique to Bermuda — a similar phenomenon occurred in the Bahamas, and still has some influence there. Curiously, the attempt to separate the Bahamas — and, arguably, Bermuda — from the region developed only in the late 1950s and 1960s against the backdrop of the struggle against White supremacy and the national liberation movements of the time. To be blunt, the narrative of isolating Bermuda from the rest of the Caribbean originates from a desire from largely White and propertied class interests as a reaction against what they saw as a threat from the Black Power and national liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

It is fundamentally an attempt to divide and rule.

• Jonathan Starling is a socialist writer with an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University