Modernity that Predated the Modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean

Abstract

Sidney Mintz’s most significant contribution to the historical anthropology of the Caribbean is his argument about the inaugural and distinctive modernity of the region. This modernity, he suggests, one that ‘predates the modern’, was shaped by the singular colonial history of the proto-industrial character of the African slave-based sugar plantations that made the region one of the earliest overseas constituents of the emerging capitalist world economy. Indeed, Mintz’s anthropological career begins in one of the projects – the Puerto Rico Project – that help to shift post-War US anthropology away from the Boasian salvaging of the ‘primitive’ towards the study of ‘contemporary’, that is, ‘modern’, people. Finally I suggest that Mintz’s magnum opus, Sweetness and Power, while clearly a book about the interconnectedness of the world, grows out of lessons about commodities, modernity, and Europe first learned in his work on Puerto Rico.