American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934

Abstract

The plantation as a socioeconomic model relies on an extensive historiography, yet it constitutes one of those inexhaustible and passionate themes that has stimulated scientific debate and surely will continue to do so in the future. César J. Ayala's book explores the nature, structure, and dynamic of the development of the sugar plantation in the twentieth century in the three Greater Antilles islands of the former colonial Spanish orbit. His analysis begins with a provocative assertion: in his opinion, North American investment in the creation of the system, far from consolidating and strengthening the old precapitalist relations, induced a radical transformation that launched an entirely different social and economic model. According to the author, an entire current of thought tends to undervalue the peculiarities of the Caribbean plantations in the twentieth century and, consequently, erroneously defines the essence of underdevelopment prevalent in the islands. He argues that a new type of underdevelop ment, founded on capitalist relations of production, emerged from the interaction between imperialist capital and the Antilles societies; it is not a result of the persistence of the old relations inherited from slave society. The under development is a new form whose source is the spread of salaried labor and modern mechanisms of economic organization, both integrated into the economic system of the United States. The result is that the author gets buried in his investigation of all the new elements that molded the plantation in the twentieth century: organizational models of capitalist enterprise, the interaction between the new owners of the economy and the social structure of the islands, and the subsequent transformation of the local class structure as a result of the movement of U.S. capital.