Sugar Plantations (long)

Plantation agriculture is not just a dominant influence in Caribbean societies, however. It was also a key source of European wealth. Caribbean lands worked by African slaves powered Europe’s industrialization. Plantations, in the words of Benítez-Rojo, “produced imperialism, wars, colonial blocs, rebellions, repressions, sugar islands, runaway slave settlements, air and naval bases, revolutions of all sorts, and even a ‘free associated state’ [Puerto Rico] next to an unfree socialist state [Cuba].”

As this list suggests, a historiography of plantation agriculture would be a hefty book in itself. That is not the project at hand here. Instead I will trace the contours of a particularly interesting strand of this historiography: the transition from plantation agriculture based on slave labor to that based on free labor. Two caveats are in order, however. First, although coffee, bananas, rubber, and cotton have all been produced on plantations, I focus on sugar, arguably the quintessential plantation crop. Second, the sugar plantations of Brazil or the southern United States are not covered here. I have confined this study to the Caribbean, especially Cuba and the Spanish Caribbean, Jamaica and the British West Indies, and Haiti.

The sugar plantation was first profitably realized in the British colony of Barbados in the 1600s, and was dominant in the region until the late 1700s, although sugar cultivation continued throughout the nineteenth century. In the British Caribbean, the emancipation transition occurred in the 1830s, and historians have focused both on the causes of emancipation and its aftermath. For the lavishly profitable French colony Saint Domingue, the transition period was from 1791 to 1804, when the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery and decimated what had been the richest sugar economy in the world. At that point, the door was open for Spain to turn its attention to developing sugar in its remaining American colonies. In the Spanish Caribbean, the slaves were freed in the 1870s and 1880s, but historical scholarship also attends to the double industrialization of sugar production, before and after the Spanish-American war of 1898.

What accounts for the course of Caribbean societies after emancipation? This is the central question addressed by each of the authors surveyed below. To what extent were post-emancipation societies shaped by former slaves and other laborers? To what extent by the elite? What role did governments play? And what role the so-called capitalist world-system? In explaining the transition from slavery to free labor, do we ascribe causation to socioeconomic structure, to human struggles, or both?

Theoretical Considerations
Before surveying this historiography, however, it is important to lay out the theoretical tension that runs through the entire body of work. It has become commonplace to speak of Caribbean plantations and global capitalism in the same breath, as though each could not exist without the other. And of course it is true that the plantation was not just an adaptation to local conditions. It was, as Sidney Mintz puts it, “an absolutely unprecedented social, economic, and political institution, and by no means simply an innovation in the organization of agriculture.” It was powered by large-scale demand for sugar in Europe, readily available land in the Americas, and enslaved African labor.

What, then, is the appropriate unit of analysis? This is Immanuel Wallerstein’s central concern in his work on what he calls the modern world-system. “The only totalities that exist or have historically existed,” he declares, “are mini-systems and world-systems, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there has been only one world-system, the capitalist world-economy.” The “essential feature” of world capitalism for Wallerstein is “production for profit in a market.” Thus, he can argue that capitalism emerged in Europe in the sixteenth century, even though industrial wage-labor was still two centuries off. Indeed, “wage labor is only one of several modes” of labor organization under agricultural capitalism, modes which include slavery, coerced cash-crop production, sharecropping, and tenancy.

By 1640, according to Wallerstein, the “three structural positions” of world capitalism were in place: core (northwest Europe), periphery (Latin America), and semi-periphery (southern Europe). The power of individual states stemmed from their position in the world-system as either exploiter, exploited, or somewhere in the middle. From the beginning, then, “capitalism was . . . an affair of the world-economy and not of nation-states.” Wallerstein is adamant that comparative studies of any lesser scope are fruitless. Even the division of this paper might be suspect for Wallerstein—Saint-Domingue, France, Jamaica, England were all just local manifestations of the world-system. There was no Cuban plantation economy; there was merely the plantation sector of the world economy that happened to be located on an island called Cuba.

In response to Wallerstein’s provocative scheme, the eminent Latin Americanist Steve Stern argues that we must “put on new spectacles and look at world history with peripheral vision”—from the perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean. Stern grants Wallerstein several insights, especially in the case of Caribbean plantations. Not only were plantations a clear example of unfree labor in the service of capitalist enterprise, in some cases “the sugar plantation islands have seemed less like societies in their own right . . . than like outposts of Europe.” Their economic organization seemed dictated by the world capitalist system.

For Stern, however, world-system theory breaks down in the light of two case studies: silver and sugar. To make a long argument short, Stern finds that Wallerstein’s theory fails to be comprehensive. The world system “constituted only one of several great ‘motor forces’” which also include “popular strategies of resistance and survival within the periphery” and elite American interests. Labor relations in Latin America and the Caribbean, on closer examination, obeyed a “law of diversity”—as Stern describes it, “a shifting combination of heterogeneous relations of production in a pragmatic package.” In the case of sugar, Stern finds that the best explanation for African slavery lies in the “interplay” between “local conditions of production” and “the international market.” In other words, Wallerstein’s theory makes global capitalism too powerful and does not adequately account for local conditions in the periphery.

This tension between world system and local conditions appears again and again in the historiography of plantation societies transitioning to free labor. Most scholars stake out a subtle middle position, and most also favor one or the other. As we will see, it is an explanatory dilemma that lends a remarkable richness to Caribbean history.

Saint-Domingue

One cannot speak of emancipation in the Caribbean without acknowledging the “particular shadow” cast by the Haitian revolution. It “threw into relief” the connection between slavery and colonialism that “European powers would try to keep under wraps for the next century and a half.” The Haitian Revolution was the first, bloodiest, most dramatic slavery-to-freedom transition in the Caribbean, and it supplied a powerful example for all sides of ensuing debates over how to transform enslaved into free labor.

The most recent history of this transition is Laurent Dubois’ dramatic narrative of the revolution’s political and military intrigue. The slaves receive their due in Dubois’ account as “the real authors of abolition.” Dubois writes the Haitian revolutionaries back into the story of democracy and human rights, showing how slaves “shattered the economy of one of the richest regions of the world.” And their discontent was not merely economic. By showing how intertwined the Haitian Revolution was with that of the French, Dubois suggests that revolutionary ideology was shared, the product of a transatlantic dialogue.

Dubois also chronicles the struggles of Haitian leaders to reconnect the war-torn nation with the world economy. The hero of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, helped convince France to free the slaves in 1794. But he also decided to rebuild the plantation economy, even if it meant coerced labor. “To save liberty, Louverture decided, was to accept that it might be something less than slaves had dreamed it would be.” Though Louverture did not last long in power, his immediate successors made but minor alterations to his scheme of forced labor. In many cases, former slaves remained on the plantations that had enslaved them—at least temporarily. For ultimately this attempt to reconstruct the plantations failed. Sugar-growers in Cuba stepped into the vacuum created by the destruction of the Haitian industry, and Haiti became a nation of agrarian peasants and migrant laborers.

Dubois alludes to Haiti’s post-independence blues of poverty, isolation, and autocracy, but his main goal is to give credit to the revolutionaries as important actors in the history of human rights. To some extent, the rest of the story is filled in by Sidney Mintz, perhaps the most famous U.S. student of Caribbean rural society. Haiti, for Mintz, is unique both for the vertiginous ascent of the sugar plantation system—becoming in a half century “possibly the most lucrative colony in modern world history”—and its rapid demise. This rise and fall “sustained powerful contradictory forces, turned free men of color into important slaveholders . . . and completely undermined the plantation ideal.” Like Dubois, Mintz is singularly impressed with Haiti’s triumph—not that it has fared well “but that it has fared at all.” It is in this spirit that Mintz speaks of Haiti’s “sturdy peasantry.”

Haitian country folk provide Mintz with a “particularly good example” of what Mintz calls a “reconstituted peasantry”, comprising peasants that started out as slaves. Perhaps more than any other Caribbean island, Haiti represents the post-emancipation extreme of almost no plantations. Most Haitians have worked their own land. Yet Haiti’s course following the revolution was not characterized by yeoman-powered prosperity. Mintz, like Dubois, attributes this fate to Haiti’s extreme international isolation in the nineteenth century. But Mintz also argues that this isolation has prevented the development of “unifying institutional forms through which class and other conflicts could be mediated, settled, or fought out.” Because the traditionalist subsistence agriculture of the peasantry went unchallenged by the ruling elite, Mintz argues, Haiti has remained poor. The “real problem of Haiti” is that “the will of the people . . . need not be heard by those who are content to rule.”

In the case of Saint-Domingue, then, the activity of locals is paramount, especially that of former slaves. Both Dubois and Mintz privilege the power of local conditions over large-scale forces.

The British Caribbean

So emancipation in Haiti was won in a bloody revolution that expelled white Europeans from the island and destroyed the plantation economy—this fact makes it unique in all the Caribbean. But as other colonial powers were faced with the question of emancipation, the specter of Haiti haunted their discussions. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese argue, the Haitian Revolution represented slaves’ realization that “the world was becoming one . . . in the coldly rational sense that a world economy was emerging, and with it a world political community.” It was followed by other slave insurrections, which according to the Fox-Genovese and Genovese were different from earlier slave revolts (but like the Haitian Revolution) in their forward-looking to the world community. Like the landowning classes of Europe, the planters of the Americas would fall to the consolidation of industrial capitalism. That Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833, for Fox-Genovese and Genovese, suggests the British elite’s recognition of this fact. How could slaves be freed without occasioning so much bloodshed? How, without disrupting the economy?

Eric Williams was an early proponent of the view promulgated later by Fox-Genovese and Genovese: that capitalism, in different forms, both created and destroyed slavery. “The commercial capitalism of the eighteenth century developed the wealth of Europe by means of slavery and monopoly,” Williams writes. “But in so doing it helped to created the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century, which turned round and destroyed . . . commercial capitalism, slavery, and all its works.” Williams acknowledges the role of humanitarian objections to slavery. And like Dubois and Mintz, he credits slaves with some agency in this process: “the most dynamic and powerful social force in the colonies was the slave himself,” he writes, contending that by 1833, “the alternatives were clear: emancipation from above, or emancipation from below. But EMANCIPATION.”

The motor of history for Williams is not ideological, however. Not is it the agency of slaves. Like a good materialist, Williams insists that historical change is first and most importantly economic. Slavery was abolished as a way to weaken the monopoly of West Indian planters, as a way to modernize agriculture and prevent overproduction. Abolition and emancipation were not ultimately about moral objections to slavery, for as Williams notes, British capitalism “continued to thrive on Brazilian, Cuban and American slavery. But West Indian monopoly had gone forever.” The planters and their old-fashioned slave labor were in the way of economic progress.

Sidney Mintz also takes a Marxian view of history, and his approach to slavery and emancipation owes much to Eric Williams. “Other things being equal,” he writes, planters agreed to emancipation because “free workers produce and consume dramatically more than slaves.” Mintz also concurs with Williams on the capitalistic nature of slavery: Caribbean slaves “were used for the creation of wealth in enterprises intimately related to world trade.” They were “industrial workers whose work was principally agricultural.” But Mintz adds to William’s account a painstaking attention to conditions on the ground. Slavery ceased to be in the best interests of planters not only because of Parliament’s anti-monopoly campaign or slave insurrections, but also because of the land situation. “From the entrepreneur’s perspective,” he points out, “free labor would not do for plantation development since land itself was free or nearly so.”

Thus, emancipation only became feasible when planters were able to force former slaves to sell their labor cheaply. In Jamaica, planters accomplished this goal with less success than in other British colonies. This was partially because of the availability of land, and partially because the planters’ coercive tactics destroyed any incentive to remain on the plantations. Here again, Mintz points out the dialectical emergence of the peasantry after emancipation. Peasants represent a “social and agricultural countertrend . . . antagonistic to the plantation rationale.” In Jamaica, the reconstituted peasantries used “skills learned in slavery” to “escape the tyranny of plantation life and to create a different style of life.” For Mintz, the agency of these peasants in crippling the plantation economy of Jamaica is obvious.

In other British colonies, however, the plantation complex adapted and survived. Alan Adamson, in his work on the plantation economy of British Guiana, argues that it is “undeniable” that positive social change in the former slave society has been “retarded and warped by the persistence of plantation monoculture.” The old planter class was weakened and “extruded” after full emancipation in 1838, but sugar continued to be produced by limited liability companies with advanced technology and imported labor. The implications of this survival, according to Adamson, can be summarized as “the persistence of a state of generalized dependency or clientage,” sustained above all by “the ultimate weapon”: planters’ political power. In this respect, it mattered little whether workers were slaves or free workers. Caribbean social structure remained rigidly intact. “Sugar survived,” Adamson concludes, “and the colony remained economically monocultural, politically oligarchic, and socially exclusive.”

Adamson acknowledges the role of the world sugar economy, arguing, for example, that British Guiana’s monoculture made it “excessively dependent on distant metropolitan centers” and “excessively isolated from its immediate neighbors.” Despite its location, it was closer to London and New York than to Brazil or Venezuela. However, Adamson emphasizes local relations of production over the pressure exerted by the world economy. Sugar survived only because local elites (along with the British colonial office) believed in the “doctrine” of its primacy and concentrated their resources on its behalf. This was especially true of their political power.

Thomas Holt comes to similar conclusions about the importance of planter political power in his more recent work on slavery and emancipation in Jamaica. Like Williams and Mintz, Holt wants to ground the idealism of British abolitionists in “a social life that is historically specific.” Unlike Williams, he does not view the post-emancipation project as mere “political expediency.” If that were true, why would colonial administrators have discussed citizenship for freed slaves at all? There were ideological concerns at stake. Holt is interested in two related questions: why was emancipation connected to citizenship and racial equality? And why was that connection abandoned?

To the first, he answers that the two were connected because citizenship had become “the norm of civil status” for classical liberalism. To the second, he argues that the emancipation experiment exposed British bourgeois ideology’s “central contradictions.” In Jamaica, the British wanted “democratic rule in a social order ultimately dependent on economic and social inequalities.” Moreover, the domestic ideal that the Jamaican working class was supposed to imitate—separate spheres for men and women, honest independence and frugal self-sufficiency—was undermined by the economic need to keep workers on the plantations. They presumed, in other words, that “a proletariat motivated by bourgeois values would remain contentedly proletarian.” Practically, the marriage of emancipation and citizenship was wrecked by the slow, painful realization that workers did not share the same interests as planters, that “black political power in Jamaica might actually be used in black people’s political and economic interests.”

In short, while Holt does not entirely dismiss class conflict in Jamaica, nor the role of the world system, he highlights instead the stricken British ideological project. If the colonial rulers had responded differently to the contradictions exposed in their ideology by emancipation—by actually granting black Jamaicans full citizenship, and making lands available to them for settlement—the course of Jamaican history might be much different.

The Spanish Caribbean

It is a curious fact that the transition to free labor in the Caribbean took nearly a full century to complete (from 1794 in Haiti to 1886 in Cuba). Sidney Mintz argues that the difference in these dates is economic and political, not ideological—that is, not because England and France were more enlightened than Spain (or Portugal). Indeed, “once emancipation was accomplished . . . there is a striking similarity between the adjustments to freedom of the South European and the North European colonies and countries.” Both imported laborers and cordoned off free land so as to insure a low price for free labor. That the transition in the Spanish Caribbean came so much later is in part the result of Saint-Domingue’s bloody transformation: the destruction of sugar production there created an opening for Cuban entrepreneurs to enter the business. Like the British and French before them, Spaniards and creoles in Cuba (and to some extent, Puerto Rico) found that sugar needed slave labor to be profitable.

Unsurprisingly, then, historians of Cuba and the Spanish Caribbean have compared these latter-day plantations with their English and French predecessors. The first of these historians, Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, used history as a cautionary tale. Writing in 1927, Guerra is unabashedly hopeful that what he saw as the disastrous consequences of emergence of the sugar latifundia, or plantation, could still be averted. According to Mintz, the “classic pattern of plantation growth” presented by Guerra comprises four stages: “original settlement by yeoman colonists;” destruction of yeoman agriculture and community by African labor and plantation agriculture; “market crisis as new settlers appeared”; and emancipation or revolution.

Beginning with Barbados, Guerra outlines the destructive effect of sugar plantation monoculture on the British West Indies. The class of British smallholders who originally settled the island fled Barbados in increasing numbers in the mid-seventeenth century. They left not because Barbados was unsatisfactory but because of “the capitalist sugar industry which, in its search for unlimited profits . . . changed young, robust, self-sustaining communities into mere workshops, where low-priced labor was exploited for the exclusive benefit of distant commercial and banking centers.” Even after the abolition of slavery, workers’ conditions did not much improve. With no available land, and nowhere to emigrate to, the ex-slaves and their descendents were unable “to escape the iron economic yoke of the latifundium.”

For Guerra, Cuba represents a potential counterexample to this typical fate of plantation societies. The fact that Cuba did not succumb to the sugar plantation until the twentieth century suggests to him that “the wretched fate of the other islands was the result of human greed, and not of some inescapable geographical determinism.” Cuba’s economic growth in the late eighteenth century, fueled by an unusually large and prosperous rural landowning class, proves to Guerra that a more equitable capitalism is possible. Cuba, unlike the English and French colonies, “had time to create a society with a character of its own”: this autonomy provided initial protection from the ravages of plantation monoculture. Even the centralista-colono system of the later 1800s, in which mill owners (centralistas) bought cane from independent cane farmers (colonos), was preferable to the latifundium’s concentration of cane land and mill under one owner.

Throughout, Guerra’s central concern is with the distribution of landownership. “As long as Cubans own and till most of the land,” he concludes, “Cuban society will be a vigorous reality.” If on the other hand “the land is lost,” he concludes, “all shall have been lost, including liberty and honor.” In other words, as Mintz writes, Guerra’s hostility “is not directed against the sugar industry or foreign capital, but—in his own words—against a system of land exploitation.” With an expansive sense of historical contingency and national pride, Guerra is also hopeful that the crisis can be averted.

It may seem unusual that Guerra pays little attention to the transition from slavery to freedom. Perhaps it is because the heyday of slave studies was still several decades off in 1927. But a modern historian similarly downplays the event. “The Law of Abolition,” Manuel Moreno Fraginals contends, “was merely the de jure recognition of a situation characterized by the de facto disintegration of the slave system.” It was “a means to the end of rationalizing the confused labor system efficiently.” The transformation in Cuba in the second half of the nineteenth century was dramatic, according to Moreno Fraginals: “It is no exaggeration to say that as regards sugar in the Caribbean, in the nineties everything was completely different from what had existed in the sixties.”

But this transformation was not driven by moral outrage over slavery, or even emancipation. Rather, the key change was the replacement of the old sugar mills or ingenios with centrales, the new industrial plantations. This change increased demand for raw cane, accelerated the production of sugar and the consolidation of smaller farms, and widened the gap between industry and agriculture, which retained some “traditional backwardness.” It replaced the slave owning planters with a “new type of industrial entrepreneur” and created an “army of unemployed workers” eight months out of the year. Even the product itself changed, as up to 21 grades of sugar packed in various containers were replaced by a single grade with one type of packaging. The storability of this white sugar and the increased production quickly created a surplus, which allowed importers to force down prices. This, combined with the expansion of European beet sugar and the hegemonic U.S. Sugar Act of 1871, forced the Spanish Caribbean into the U.S. economic orbit. Political annexation, of course, would follow with the Spanish American War of 1898.

In the end, Moreno Fraginals interprets the transformation of the sugar industry in Cuba as a manifestation of the “modern sugar industry” more than of local decision-making. But the development of this global system, at least in the Spanish Caribbean, came much later than Wallerstein might place it: it was only in the late 1800s that the “virtually defenseless” cane sugar-producing countries fell under the domination of the “great international trade interests.”

Rebecca Scott takes a different approach to the relative power of big structures and local actors. As she puts it, “neither structures nor struggles could fully determine the outcome.” Her finely-grained descriptions of Cuban society during and after emancipation, in turn, lead to some very different conclusions.

Scott challenges the notion that emancipation was a product of world capitalism’s self-revision as seen in Williams, or of technological change, as in Moreno Fraginals. Nor does she attribute emancipation primarily to the ideological contradictions of the planters. She finds instead that the most prosperous, modernized plantations were the least likely to free their slaves, and that the slaves themselves were instrumental in the transition to free labor. “Slaves and, later, patrocinados [apprentices] had their own ideas about freedom,” she writes, “and through their actions they altered and accelerated the transition.” Many of them purchased their own manumission well before formal emancipation was declared in 1886. And most former slaves moved to occupy or even purchase uncultivated land, a step that could have “consequences for both subsistence and citizenship.” As for freedmen of other Caribbean islands, so for Cuban ex-slaves: often-penurious independence was preferable to wage labor back on the plantation.

But owning land was also important because of its potential for securing citizenship. In this respect, Scott concludes very differently from Moreno Fraginals: “emancipation had transformed Cuban society, dismantling the most rigid of the barriers that separated whites and blacks: the institution of slavery.” In Scott’s view, the ability of former slaves to obtain and keep suffrage rights was one of the most significant developments in Cuban history. By clinging to universal manhood suffrage, Cubans of all races frustrated efforts by U.S. and Cuban elites to segregate society. There was, however, an important check on the agency of the former slaves: the actions of the descendents of slaves were only effective “if the state did not close down that public space.” No matter how economically and socially mobilized they were, the power of local groups ultimately depended on the political recognition of the central government. The recognition of the central government depended, in turn, on the imagination of Cuba as a multiracial society. Cuban independence from Spain was won with the contributions of colored Cubans, many of whom had won their personal freedom just a few years earlier. Scott’s story is one of local actors limited by political and economic conditions, an interesting twist on the more common tale of powerful world systems limited by local conditions.

Many of the historians surveyed above mention the importance of ecological factors in sugar cultivation. Alan Adamson’s first chapter lays out the “ecological background” of sugar plantations in British Guiana. Sidney Mintz mentions the role played by “different ecologies” of sugar-producing areas. And of course, the exhaustion of soil is mentioned as a factor in the sugar industry’s decline in particular areas. But overall, there is little specific analysis of the reciprocal relationship between humans and the land in sugar producing regions. Richard Tucker is not a historian of the Caribbean, and his history of the relationship between U.S. consumer demand and the environmental degradation of the tropics is a survey of many topics. But he gestures in a helpful direction. “Plantation sugar,” he writes, “has been the most severe exploiter and transformer of both social and ecological systems over past half millennium” in the Caribbean. The clearing of native forests, massive migrations into sugar lowlands, the domestication of “bioregions far removed from the actual site of sugar production” for food and other supplies—these “ecological reverberations” of sugar cultivation have been far-reaching. It seems that these reverberations could sustain greater scholarly attention than they have yet received.

Conclusion
“The differentials in the growth of the slave plantations in different colonies,” and, one might add, the circumstances of emancipation, “are to be understood as resulting from different ecologies, different rates of maturation of metropolitan markets and industries, and different political relationships between creole governing bodies and the metropolitan authorities.” In this way Sidney Mintz summarized perhaps the most common rendition of the Caribbean sugar-and-slavery story. But as Mintz suggests, and others solidly demonstrate, the world economy does not entirely explain the transition of slave labor to free. Dubois presents the Haitian Revolution as a successful revolt against, among other things, that world system. Alan Adamson shows how local elites adapted and reestablished the plantation. Thomas Holt clarifies the interplay of ideology with economic necessity in the story of British emancipation. Ramiro Guerra argues that Cubans had the power to resist subjugation to world-system dictated monoculture. Similarly, Rebecca Scott shows that slaves in Cuba had a lot to do with their transition to freedom and citizenship. And for others, it is not so much the world system, nor local actors, but the plantation itself that has manipulated Caribbean society and landscape. “The plantation machine in its essential features,” writes Antonio Benítez-Rojo, “keeps on operating as oppressively as before.”

Yet Benítez-Rojo’s description also suggests another direction for plantation studies, one also suggested by Richard Tucker. “Its inexorable territory-claiming nature,” Benítez-Rojo intones, “demolishing forests, sucking up rivers, displacing other crops, and exterminating the native plants and animals.” What were, what are the environmental costs of sugar cultivation? Understanding sugar’s impact on the land could also enlarge our understanding of the land’s impact on the residents of those islands, especially those peasantries that depend most closely upon it.

NOTES
Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective 2nd ed., trans. James E. Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 72.
Benítez-Rojo, 74.
Benítez-Rojo, 9.
Mintz, “Foreword”, in Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean: An Economic History of Cuban Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1964 [1927]), xiv.
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (Sept., 1974), 390.
Wallerstein, 398, 399.
Wallerstein, 400.
Wallerstein, 401.
Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective Latin America and the Caribbean,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (Oct., 1988), 832.
Stern, 847.
Stern, 857-858.
Stern, 870.
Stern, 862.
Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott, “Introduction” in Cooper, Holt, and Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 11.
Cooper, Holt, and Scott, 12.
Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 192.
Laurent Dubois, 113.
Dubois, 192-193.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 262.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 262-263.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 263.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 267, 133.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 268.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 301.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 301.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of World Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 408.
Williams, 210.
Williams, 201, 208.
Williams, 176.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 74.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 47-48.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 65.
Mintz, “Foreword”, xxi.
Mintz, 134.
Alan Adamson, Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 7.
Adamson, 10.
Adamson, 11.
Adamson, 255.
Adamson, 262.
Adamson, 256.
Thomas C. Holt, “The Essence of the Contract: The Articulation of Race, Gender, and Political Economy in British Emancipation Policy, 1838-1866”, in Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 37.
Holt, 38.
Holt, 39.
Holt, 44.
Holt, 49.
Holt, 36.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 73.
Mintz “Foreword”, xvii.
Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean: An Economic History of Cuban Agriculture (New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1964 [1927]), 16.
Guerra, 19.
Guerra, 45.
Mintz, “Foreword”, xxvi.
Guerra, 155.
Mintz, “Foreword”, xliii.
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “Plantations in the Caribbean: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Stanley L. Engerman, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, and Frank Moya Pons, eds., Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 18.
Moreno Fraginals, 19.
Moreno Fraginals, 3.
Moreno Fraginals, 5.
Moreno Fraginals, 5, 6.
Moreno Fraginals, 10-11.
Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 263.
Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), xii.
Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 119.
Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 292.
Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 264.
Adamson, 15-18.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 72.
Richard P. Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 60-61.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations 72.
Benítez-Rojo, 73.
Benítez-Rojo, 72.