Sugar cropscapes in Trinidad: reframing sweetness and power

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The British Nutrition Transition and its Histories

Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Global Capitalism, Pluto, London, 2015; 400 pp: 0745336159, 24.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) Introduction Eight hundred years of global history explained! Anievas and Nijancioglu's book is an ambitious attempt to amalgamate discussions in the fields of international relations, global history, Marxism, world-systems theory and historical sociology into a great machine of explanation, the side of which is stamped with the newly repainted letters 'Uneven and Combined Development'. The Trotskyist theory, re-outlined by IR theorists and displayed for discussion and reassemblage, now provides the screen across which the past of the global proletariat can unscroll, and on which to better project the future that awaits it. Through post-colonial and political theory, the Introduction argues persuasively for an ever more complex understanding of capitalism (p. 9), but also firmly attempts to swat away two erroneous and yet arguably dominant Marxist stories of capitalism's development. In order to battle these theories, the authors draw on the work of a wide breadth of global scholars, slowing down the centripetal force of Europe on world history to understand the dynamics of other agents instead--whether of control or rebellion--in the expansive universe of capitalism's ascendency. Leon Trotsky's theory of 'combined and uneven development' is given a robust defence in Chapter 2. Terms such as 'the whip of external necessity', 'substitutionalism' and 'privilege of backwardness' are put back into a history of party politics and the Bolshevik general's marshaling of his terminology, along with his troops and coterie. The authors do not shrink from providing some obvious criticisms. This includes explaining the theory's reliance on the teleological terms of 'advanced' and 'backward' societies (p. 56), reinterpreting these instead as 'asymmetries and 'imbalances' between societies, rather a directional flow. These opening chapters thus make clear that this is an autocritical work in which the authors wish to correct the racist and patriarchal mistakes of Marxist theory, incorporating not only the histories of production beyond the European frontier, but also the analyses by feminist and non-European scholars. This is an extraordinary ambition: surely few contemporary projects of historical writing have quite so audacious a mission or scope. Chapter 3 begins the historical journey with the nomadic mode of production on the Mongol grasslands, moving across the trade routes, with the Black Death upon them, into feudal Europe and the demographic crisis which, the authors claim, catapulted Europe into capitalism. Chapter 4 argues for the distinction between tributary and feudal modes of production. The authors then claim that that it was the superior army of the Ottoman tributary mode that halted European expansionism, forcing European powers to look elsewhere--the East and West Indies--for necessary feudal agricultural expansion and merchant trade. In both chapters, Europe reaps the 'privileges of backwardness' in relation to other modes of production. Chapter 5 moves overseas with the merchant adventurers, first through the Spanish legal theories of Amerindians and the influence of New World map-making on European's conceptions of their home territory, and then the twin rise of New World slavery and industrial capitalism, these last as combined and mutually intertwined systems of production and circulation. Chapter 6 works as a moment of repose in the global whirlwind, turning back to the conflicts within Europe which had begun to be outlined in Chapter 4, and arguing that it was the preoccupation of the majority of European powers either with New World expansionism or battling the Ottoman Empire that allowed Holland and England the geopolitical space' (p. 184) for the political primacy of merchant capital and the early appearance of bourgeois revolutions. …

Garveyism was carried across the globe following the First World War, generating the largest mass movement in the history of the African diaspora. Throughout Africa and Europe, the Americas and Oceania, the ideas and praxis of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey and his followers sparked anti-colonial and anti-racist mobilizations, both within Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and without. This volume—the first edited collection devoted to Garveyism studies in three decades—showcases original essays by scholars working in Africa, the West Indies, the Hispanic Caribbean, North America, and Australia. The work in this volume and elsewhere has rendered untenable the longstanding idea that Garveyism was a brief and misguided phenomenon, or that it was a sideshow to the normative political trajectories of African American, Caribbean, African, and global history. The essays in this volume instead encourage students and scholars to rethink the emergence of black nationalism and modern black politics in a manner that moves Garveyism from the margins of analysis to the center. They suggest the need to revisit local, regional, national, and global histories in light of what Garveyism scholars have uncovered.

Reviewed by: For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, medicine and power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848 Justin Roberts For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, medicine and power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848 Niklas Thode Jensen . Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012. The vast majority of the scholarship on West Indian sugar slavery has focused on British and, to a lesser extent, French West Indian sugar plantations. Few scholars have the necessary language skills to explore sugar slavery in the Danish and Dutch West Indies. In For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, medicine and power in the Danish West Indies, 1803-1848, Niklas Thode Jensen offers us a rare opportunity to learn about aspects of sugar planting and its impact on the enslaved in St. Croix, the primary sugar island in the Danish West Indies. Yet, what Jensen's study ultimately proves is that there was little substantial difference between the Danish, British and French West Indies when it came to how sugar was grown, how labor was managed and the impact of sugar on enslaved bodies. Jensen explores the specific causes of death and disease among sugar slaves after the Danish abolition of the slave trade. He relies on recent scientific studies and a "modern biomedical conceptual frame" (8) to try to determine exactly why sugar production was so deadly for enslaved workers. In doing so, he privileges a conventional Western medical viewpoint as a framework for explanation. This approach is both Eurocentric and whiggish, implying that more advanced European-derived medical traditions can better explain early modern death and disease. In essence, he continues to examine enslaved bodies through the colonizing gaze. To understand the health of the enslaved, Jensen is often forced to speculate to arrive at estimates of particulars such as the caloric expenditures of sugar workers or the amount of provisions that a field would yield. He draws on evidence from modern sugar workers or from what he calls "developing countries" to arrive at his estimates (168). One has to wonder about the applicability of such evidence to an enslaved sugar society nearly two hundred years ago. Sugar workers in the modern world may be working at a different pace and with different tools and varieties of cane. Developmental models rely on a stage-based and progressive theory of history that has long since been discarded by most historians. Jensen concludes his study of the health of enslaved sugar workers by arguing that "workload," as other scholars have suggested for British West Indian sugar plantations, was not the determinative factor in the high levels of mortality and morbidity on sugar plantations (259). Instead, Jensen says, it "was a larger complex of synergistic factors behind the living conditions of the enslaved on the sugar plantations that caused the morbidity and mortality" (250). For Jensen, such factors include housing, nutrition, food storage, parasites and water supply. He does acknowledge, however, that the work in early modern cane production was brutal and that "the energy forced from the enslaved during the working day was rising during this period" (135, punctuation altered). Jensen systematically compares his findings about health care and slave mortality and morbidity in St. Croix to the British and French West Indies and he finds, for the most part, almost no difference. Jensen's most significant comparative observation is that "what made St. Croix different was the degree of government control of the health of the enslaved" (259). He also notes that with regard to government policies, Danish colonial administrators were less concerned with reducing the workload of the enslaved than advocates of the amelioration of slavery were in the British West Indies. Jensen closely examines how the Danish colonial administration tried to improve three key areas in plantation health care: the nutrition of the enslaved, the use of smallpox vaccinations among the enslaved and the training of midwives on plantations. He argues, not surprisingly, that the colonial administration's policies in these areas drew on Danish models and he suggests that "the reason for the stronger central control of the health services in the Danish West Indies was the health services in the mother country were under strong, centralized control...

This volume of essays both seeks to take an innovative approach to music history and has an unusual history of its own. In 2012 musicologist Reinhard Strohm received the Balzan Prize from the International Balzan Prize Foundation (Milan/Zurich), an award presented to major scholars and scientists with the intention that half of their prize money should be used to support midcareer researchers working on a specified program. Strohm, as project leader, “opted for a project on global music history and, together with a Steering Committee, decided to invite researchers of historical musicology and ethnomusicology for study visits at six participating institutes to carry out or to complete their researches on the music of different world regions” (xiv). With the support of the Balzan Musicology Project, the authors included in this volume “studied the relatedness and the singularity of historical musics around the world,” seeking to articulate in different ways “a panorama of controversy, resilience, and at the very least, interaction.” This volume aims “to promote post-European historical thinking,” “based on the idea that a global history of music cannot be one single, hegemonic history” but “rather explore the paradigms and terminologies that might describe a history of many different voices” (xiii).The resulting collection of essays is collaborative in the sense that it is the outcome of “selected and peer-reviewed research writings” (xiv) produced as a result of study visits to participating institutes, as well as a series of international workshops held at institutions across Europe and England. Only the introduction to the volume, authored by Martin Stokes, was commissioned separately (xiv). Three essays placed immediately after the introduction historicize this intellectual venture and articulate the importance of the Enlightenment as the historical touchstone of the idea of a global music history. Of these essays, David R. M. Irving's interrogates early modern concepts of music in comparison to those of the ancient Greek; Estell Joubert's addresses early global ethnomusicological analytical encounters; and Philip V. Bohlman's concerns musical thought in the global Enlightenment.The remaining sixteen essays are sorted according to the general geographical location of their subject matter, which includes East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and the Americas. Given the prominence of Africa as a site for early historical work in ethnomusicology, as well as in the field of oral history, not to mention the European colonial presence on that continent from early dates, the exclusion of African case studies and the omission of musicologists and ethnomusicologists studying Africa are surprising. The final essay by Tina K. Ramnarine does explore in part connections established through “past imperial spreads,” drawing on “cultural survival in Caribbean plantation contexts and the legacies of African enslavement” (439).Seven of the essays focus on East Asia, most addressing musical encounters across or beyond that region. These include musical encounters between Latins, Mongols, and Persians ca. 1250–1350 (Jason Stoessel); musics along the Silk and Maritime routes in transcultural perspective (Max Peter Baumann); adaptation of Western music education after the Meiji Restoration in Japan (Rinko Fujita); bidirectional flows of Western and Japanese musics (Oliver Seibt); entangling and intercrossing of European music in Korea (Jin-Ah Kim); interchange of Korean, Japanese, and American musical terminology in Korea post-1945 (Keith Howard); and a general essay on East Asian musics in global historical perspective and the epistemological problems of cross-cultural global approaches (Nicola Spakowski).Three essays discuss musics of South and Southeast Asia: the modernization of old bamboo instruments in Bandung, Indonesia (Henry Spiller); cultural autonomy and the “Indian exception” (Matthew Pritchard); and the poetics and politics of cross-cultural exchanges between Indian and Western musicians (Suddhaseel Sen). The final group of articles discuss different regions and topics from the Americas, including two focusing on Jesuit missions and the appropriation of European practices along with creative adaptation of indigenous practices in South America (Leonardo J. Waisman and Tomas Jeż). Four others approach, respectively, musical topoi representing landscape in Argentine art music (Melanie Plesch); pentatonic scales in the musical representation of the Peruvian Andes (Julio Mendivil); political dimensions of street vendors’ cries in Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas's early works (Roberto Kolb-Neuhaus); and the use of indigenous musical materials such as the waltz and danza in a Venezuelan masterpiece of musical nationalism (Juan Francisco Sans). The final contribution compares two ethnographic examples related to festivals from the Caribbean and Canada (Tina K. Ramnarine).Martin Stokes's introduction to this volume is probing and useful, querying who would want to construct a global history and why and situating the Balzan project in conversation with earlier engagements alongside historical studies in comparative musicology, ethnomusicology, postcolonial studies, globalization theory, and sound studies (4). However, for this reader, Nicola Spakowski's essay, encountered only midway through the volume at the end of the East Asian section, provides both the clearest map “to the new field of ‘global history,’” a clarifying explanation of the “relation between area studies and the global disciplines . . . in understanding the ‘distant’ and its relation to the West,” and the “conceptual variations in large-scale and connective history” (221). Spakowski's contribution is an important one that acknowledges the difficulty in setting aside Eurocentrism despite the best intentions to do so and sounding a challenge to area studies approaches despite their ubiquitous presence in the volume.Studies on a Global History of Music is an impressive volume on the level of the individual case studies; it covers a great deal of musical time and space, as well as multiple methodologies. While most of the essays seek to decolonize music history and to at least establish dialogues with musics in different eras and locales, the study of global music history provides a substantial challenge in this regard both for its individual authors and for the group as a whole. For the reader from ethnomusicology, as gently hinted in Stokes's introduction (8), the Balzan Musicology Project's volume reviewed here may not seem so new an approach, given the longtime global reach of research in historical ethnomusicology. There are rich offerings in ethnomusicology, as was succinctly surveyed more than thirty years ago in a volume dedicated to a “pioneer in the study of modern music history,” Bruno Nettl (Blum, Bohlman, and Neumann 1991). At that time, the coeditors of that volume, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, also acknowledged that their project to document “world history” had its roots in eighteenth-century Europe. Like the Balzan volume, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History addressed a wide array of music histories from multiple continents, endeavoring to approach “historically situated human subjects” (7) critically by focusing on the manner in which music and its study are perceived differently by both insiders and outsiders, by exploring who holds authority in acts of historical interpretation, by documenting brokers and mediators between and among different musics, and through exposing how music is reproduced and renewed through a multiplicity of factors, both local and global, over the course of time. The search for a global history of music clearly has been and continues to be a subject of deep interest across music disciplines, and Studies on a Global History of Music provides additional case studies and yet more cross-cultural dialogues for those committed to this genre of a broader musical scholarship.

Aim. To continue writing the chronology of the discovery and development of Spanish Florida by the European states in the 16th century. This article examines the period between 1523 and 1525.Methodology. The article uses archival documents, maps and materials of scientific research avail -able for 2022. The methodological basis of the research is the principles of historicism, objectivity and consistency; the principle of objectivity was necessary to avoid the subjectivity of French and Spanish authors covering facts and events in completely different ways; the principle of historicism was used to understand the difference in views between the present and the past adoption of a life-style, and a systematic approach made it possible to combine disparate events in the Old and New Worlds into a logical correlation.Results. Related events in the history of the Old and New Worlds that affect the development of Spanish Florida have been studied. Revealing the connection between the birth of the Habsburg Empire and the onset of the “silver age of piracy” in the Atlantic and the New World. The author’s translation into Russian of the “Celler Codex” is presented to identify links between the expedition of D. Verrazano in 1524 and the destruction of the world order. The causal relationships between the organization of expeditions and the internal struggle between the local elites in the West Indies have been studied. The starting point of the “breaking” of the world order that was settled in 1494, which influenced the future development of world history, was determined.Research implications . In Russian historical science and in the post-Soviet space, for the first time, the chronology of related events on the discovery and development of the southeastern part of North America from 1523 to 1525 is presented in such detail, going through understanding of the causal relationships of events that took place in different parts of the world and a description of the emergence of the “silver age of piracy”, which was facilitated by the publication of the full author’s translation of the text of the “Celler Codex” in Russian. The practical significance of this work is seen in the possibility of drawing up and organizing a special course on the opening and development of the eastern part of North America and/or the development of piracy in the 16th century when studying world history in universities and high schools.

Over last ten years critics have focused increasingly on role of Caribbean in William Faulkner's fiction. According to John T. Matthews, this recent interest in West Indian component of Faulkner's works has served to uncover long-neglected connections between new world histories and experiences (239). For example, several critical studies have centered upon complex relationship between U.S. South and island of Haiti in Faulkner's 1936 modernist novel Absalom!, reconfiguring imaginative geography of Faulkner's South as a kind of Caribbean rimlands. In Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions, Richard Godden reads Haitian dimension of Faulkner's narrative as a direct and powerful comment upon practice of southern slavery in nineteenth-century America. Godden argues that Haitian slave rebellion of 1791 and subsequent establishment of Western hemisphere's first black independent nation in 1804 transformed Haiti into U.S. slaveholders' worst nightmare; in Absalom!, Haiti shadows Faulkner's plantation South as a haunting threat synonymous with revolution (686). Haitian presence in Faulkner's novel has also been analyzed in terms of its relevance to issues of early twentieth-century U.S. empire. In The Hidden Caribbean 'Other' in William Faulkner's Absalom!: An Ideological Ancestry of U.S. Maritza Stanchich asserts that black island nation, held under U.S. military rule from 1915-1934, emerges in Faulkner's novel as an imperialist representation of Caribbean. Through descriptions of the marginal, unnamed, assumed, but nonetheless useful presence of Caribbean, one can glean imperial designs of Faulkner's own generation in West Indies (605). According to Barbara Ladd, America's imperial interests in Haiti can be discerned most directly in Faulkner's novel through puzzling and phantasmal character of Charles Bon, who is born there and becomes increasingly associated in novel with nation of Haiti. Ladd interprets America's early twentieth-century imperial engagement in Caribbean directly through 1910 narrators' reconstruction (542) of Charles Bon and his black island origins. In this essay, I build upon Stanchich's and Ladd's examinations of early twentieth-century U.S. imperialist representations of Haiti in Absalom!. I further assert that Faulkner's novel thematically foregrounds designs of early twentieth-century American empire toward Haiti through historically prevalent discourse of paternalism. According to historian Mary A. Renda, paternalism served as primary discursive mechanism that enabled American invasion and takeover of Haiti for nineteen years. In Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940, Renda examines a range of cultural artifacts including imperial documents, Marines' magazines, soldiers' memoirs, and best-selling novels, to show how early twentieth-century Americans were encouraged to envision Haiti's black island nation as a fatherless child in need of stern paternal guidance from United States (250). Extending Renda's claims to Faulkner's novel, I argue that Quentin and Shreve's 1910 narrative that reconstructs Charles Bon as abandoned Haitian son must be recognized as a vital part of emerging paternalist discourse that came to justify and maintain American imperialism in Haiti. Just as U.S. Marines and ordinary American citizens were taught to imagine poor black island nation as an orphan in need of adult male guidance, Quentin and Shreve visualize Haiti as a deserted son who craves nothing more than American father's paternal recognition. When read in context of U.S. imperialism, Absalom! clearly dramatizes America's paternalist ideology regarding Haiti and emerges as a significant text in culture of early twentieth-century U. …

Societal Impact StatementDespite strong historical declines, Guadeloupe and Haiti's coffee sectors remain important to rural communities' livelihood and resilience. Coffee also holds value as part of the islands' historical legacy and cultural identities. Furthermore, it is often grown in agroforestry systems providing important ecosystem services, which will become more important as these vulnerable islands work to adapt to a changing climate. Current efforts to revitalize coffee farms and target strategically important specialty markets would benefit from understanding existing genetic resources and the historical factors that shaped them. Our study reveals the rich history reflected in current coffee stands on the islands.Summary The West Indies, particularly former French colonies like Haiti and Guadeloupe, were central to the spread of coffee in the Americas. The histories of these Islands are shared until the 19th century, where they diverged significantly. Still, both Islands experienced a strong decline in their coffee sector. Characterizing the genetic and varietal diversity of their coffee resources and understanding historical factors shaping them can help support revitalization efforts. To that end, we performed Kompetitve Allele‐Specific PCR (KASP) genotyping of 80 informative single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) markers on field samples from across main coffee‐growing region of Guadeloupe, and two historically important ones in Haiti, as well as 146 reference accessions from international collections. We also compared bioclimatic variables from sampled geographic areas and searched for historical determinants of present coffee resources. At least five Coffea arabica varietal groups were found in Haiti, versus two in Guadeloupe, with admixed individuals in both. The traditional Typica variety is still present in both islands, growing across a variety of climatic environments. We also found Coffea canephora on both islands, with multiple likely origins, and identified C. liberica var. liberica in Guadeloupe. These differences are explained by the Islands' respective histories. Overall, Guadeloupe experienced fewer, but older introductions of non‐Typica coffee. By contrast, several recent introductions have taken place in Haiti, driven by local and global factors and reflecting the history of Arabica varietal development and spread. Diversity on these islands is dynamic, and our results reveal opportunities and limits to the future of Guadeloupean and Haitian coffee.

This essay, by revisiting the capitalism and slavery debate, explores the material relations between the Industrial Revolution and the crisis of Black slavery in the British Empire from the perspectives of critical theory and global history. After suggesting that the debate has made capital invisible as a category of historical analysis, I argue that the Industrial Revolution unleashed a process of widening trade circuits around the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific within which the abolition debate should be understood. These new global circuits of trade became a powerful material mediation between the crisis of slavery in the West Indies; the rise of slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil; and the advancement of New Imperialism in the East.

The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792–1801 offers a comprehensive and jargon-free coverage of this turbulent period and unites political, social, military and international history in one volume. Carefully designed for undergraduate students, through twelve chapters this book offers an introduction to the origins and international context of the French Revolution as well as an in-depth examination of the reasons why war began. Aspects unpicked within the book include how France acquired a de facto empire stretching from Holland to Naples; the impact of French conquest on the areas concerned; the spread of French ideas beyond the frontiers of the French imperium; the response of the powers of Europe to the sudden expansion in French military power; the experience of the conflicts unleashed by the French Revolution in such areas as the West Indies, Egypt and India; and the impact of war on the Revolution itself. Offering extensive geographical coverage and challenging many preconceived ideas, The Wars of the French Revolution, 1792–1801 is the perfect resource for students of the French Revolution and international military history more broadly.

Aprés l'abolition de l'esclavage, le besoin de main d'oeuvre pour industrie du sucre dans les Caraïbes a donné naissance à un système de «contrats de servage». Ainsi, entre 1850 et 1855 des centaines de milliers d'indiens et de chinois ont été recrutés pour travailler sur les champs de canne à sucre aux Indes Occidentales et à Hawaii. Les abus dans le processus de recrutement étaient évidents: l'exploitation, les maladies graves, voire la mort étaient l'ordre du jour. Pour faciliter et réguler le recrutement de chinois, les anglais ont créé un organisme spécial à Hong Kong entre 1852 et 1853, par lequel des missionnaires chrétiens servaient de recruteurs. Parmi eux, le plus actif fut Wilhelm Lobscheid, qui a non seulement recruté des chinois par le biais du système de servage, mais aussi conseillé l'organisme britannique en matière de politique. Les missionnaires chrétiens ont aidé au processus d'emigration de chinois convertis vers la Guyana britannique et Hawaii. En effet, la mission Bassel, concentrée sur l'évangélisation parmi les Hakka, leur a aussi offert asile lors des rebellions Taiping et les luttes entre le peuple Hakka et le peuple cantonnais. De même, elle a aidé les familles chrétiennes à émigrer vers la Guyana et Hawaii, où elles ont bâti des églises qui ont servi de centres religieux, éducatifs et sociaux. Une fois les contrats terminés, la plupart des travailleurs engagés par contrat ont abandonné les champs de canne à sucre, mais peu d'entre eux avaient l'argent pour rentrer chez eux. En revanche, ils se sont installés dans les villes, ce qui a eu comme résultat l'établissement de sociétés multiculturelles et multiraciales, ainsi que la création de congrégations chrétiennes aux Indes Occidentales et à Hawaii.

Free Colored West Indians: A Racial Dilemma David Lowenthal Slavery WAS SCARCELY a racial issue in the eighteenthcentury West Indies; it was a racial fact. Seventeenth-century Eu­ ropean entrepreneurs established tropical plantations in the Carib­ bean with African slave labor; their successors universally pre­ sumed all slaves to be black and all whites to be free. West Indian whites never seriously questioned the virtues of slavery as an insti­ tution until Europe forced emancipation on them in the nineteenth century. West Indian contrasts with the North American colonies are striking. During the eighteenth century, more and more Ameri­ cans considered slavery morally repugnant and socially dangerous. By the time of the American Revolution, most of the northern colonies had abolished slavery, and many southerners, themselves reluctant slaveholders, sought to limit its scope and to abolish the slave trade so as to promote eventual emancipation. Most Ameri­ cans viewed the "peculiar institution" as a source of unmitigated evil.1 But in the West Indies, slavery was not a peculiar institution, it was a universal one. There were ten slaves to every non-slave, and few free men of any complexion regarded Negro slavery as immoral or unjust. Notwithstanding the ubiquitous character of West Indian Ne­ gro slavery, two kinds of people constituted categories outside the system: whites who were not free, and non-whites who were free. Emigration soon eliminated the first: a hundred thousand white indentured servants, made redundant by African slavery on the sugar estates, streamed out of the Caribbean to the Atlantic sea­ 335 Racism in the Eighteenth Century board of North America and elsewhere. The few thousand poor whites who remained endured general contempt for ways of life little distinguishable from those of slaves; indeed, many called them 'white Negroes.” West Indians who were free but not white were a more serious and pervasive anomaly. These were of two kinds. Some were slaves who had fled plantation servitude to the mountainous and wooded hinterlands, whence they sporadically raided towns and estates while avoiding recapture. Two substantial groups of runaways and rebels, the Maroons of Jamaica and the Bush Negro tribes of Surinam and French Guiana, resisted all efforts to subdue them; colonial regimes and European empires had to treat with them as self-governing black enclaves, which have maintained their auton­ omy up to the present time. Rebel slaves in French St. Domingue went much further: they brought down the plantocracy and ex­ pelled the whites. Even in the smaller islands, some runaway slave hideouts survived for generations, a remote but ominous presence of which slaveowners always had to take notice. Rebel and runaway slaves remained essentially outside the West Indian social order, however, when they did not entirely over­ whelm it; they constituted a force to be reckoned with, not one that invited intimate commingling. The opposite was true of the free colored—those set free or born free, often the offspring of planters and slaves. Free colored West Indians were an integral part of the social order, and they accepted its regulations and internalized its values, even the perspectives that denigrated them. The free colored population grew slowly until the middle of the eighteenth century and thereafter became increasingly numerous. By the time of emancipation they outnumbered whites everywhere but Jamai­ ca, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands. This essay discusses the conflicts between racial theory and prac­ tice engendered by West Indian acceptance of this free colored element, ambiguously positioned between black and white. I shall refer primarily to British, French, and Dutch colonies in and around the Caribbean, 'where large-scale plantations and African slavery were generally more pervasive and came earlier than in Latin America and mainland North America. But this framework 336 Free Colored West Indians is at once too narrow and too sweeping. The non-Hispanic West Indies, which included most of the islands and Guiana in South America, developed patterns of culture and society that set them off from Latin America.2 But in contrast with the slave states of North America the condition of the free colored in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the Spanish American mainland in many ways re­ sembled that in the West Indies.3...

Caribbean historian Selwyn H. H. Carrington’s painstaking and exhaustive archival research in the Caribbean and England over the last 30 years has finally culminated in the publication of his new book. In it he discusses the critical decline of the sugar plantation economy in the British West Indies followed by the outbreak of the American Revolution. In the foreword, Colin Palmer discusses the importance of Carrington’s work in Caribbean historiography. Lowell J. Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class, 1763–1833 (1929) first argued that the economic decline of the British Caribbean preceded the abolition of the slave trade (1807). Ragatz’s thesis was elaborated further by Eric Williams in his classic Capitalism and Slavery (1944). Indeed, Carrington’s book has been written largely as a reaffirmation of this “decline-and-abolition thesis,” which was challenged and opposed by our contemporaries, most notably Seymour Drescher in his Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (1977).The book’s first four chapters discuss external factors of the West Indian sugar plantation economy from the pre–American Revolutionary period until after 1775. The author first discusses the establishment of the agro-export monoculture economy in the British Caribbean. The region depended on the metropolis, which imported most of their superior sugar, as well as on the British colonial mainland, which imported their rum and secondary crops while supplying them with foodstuffs and lumber. The outbreak of the American Revolution ended the seemingly well-balanced trade between the West Indes and the former British mainland, and the British government’s increasingly restrictive policy for the regulation of the West Indes trade further deteriorated the plantation economy of the Caribbean colonies. The middle part of the book is “chiefly concerned with internal issues” (p. 7); Carrington assesses the continued growth of planters’ debts at the end of the eighteenth century, despite their efforts at amelioration on individual plantations. The last four chapters analyze the continued decline in the colonial Caribbean economy between 1789 and 1810; the author demonstrates that the economy was in constant decline despite the seeming adjustments during and after the Haitian Revolution. Carrington accordingly concludes that the abolition of the slave trade was by no means the cause of the decline in the Caribbean sugar plantation economy.Carrington successfully presents a complex series of historical events in which important historical actors, both external and internal, took distinctive actions for their economic self-interests. Externally, England, after having lost its mainland colony, did not protect the sugar economy of her Caribbean colonies. Internally, the colonial elite continued to lose their economic power, and the colonial societies began to observe new problems. The steam engine and other technological innovations were not introduced in the West Indies until the sugar economy was in decline. Whereas Caribbean planters tried to resolve their financial problems by importing more female slaves for reproduction and by hiring their slaves out for wage earning, slaves themselves took advantage of the shaky plantation economy to find and create new and better socioeconomic opportunities. Some even managed to purchase their freedom. Their decisions and actions clearly illuminate the breakdown of slave society from inside, through the personal negotiations of power between the powerful (the absentee planters) and the powerless (the enslaved). This reader wonders if these middle chapters might have been developed into a separate monograph, which could appeal to a wide range of scholars and students of slavery and emancipation in the Americas.It should also be noted that the author tends to be repetitive in his arguments, and he does not discuss the abolition of the slave trade to any great extent. Furthermore, despite his statement that his study “has been fertilized by modern scholarship through historical investigation” (p. 10), his bibliography includes only a handful secondary works published after 1990. One wonders if that merely reflects a lack of interest in the topics this book deals with. Nonetheless, this book is clearly a valuable contribution to Caribbean history, studies of New World slave systems, the transatlantic slave trade, and emancipation, as well as to the growing field of Atlantic history. It will be well appreciated by historians who specialize in the economic history of major slave societies of the Americas. Carrington is also to be praised for his meticulous use of an amazing quality and quantity of primary sources, including abundant plantation papers that have never been presented before.

Collecting the History of the Church in Australia

Reviewed by: Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal Julia W. Bernier Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. By Caitlin Rosenthal. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 295. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-97209-4.) In Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management, Caitlin Rosenthal presents a compelling “business history of plantation slavery” (p. 8). Rosenthal argues that slavery created a special set of conditions that allowed for modern business management and organizational practices to take shape. Rather than representing slavery as a strain on capitalist enterprise, Rosenthal shows that the unfree labor on which the plantation system depended allowed for intensive tracking, managing, and increased production in ways that were particular to slavery. Slavery allowed for long-term supervision of the enslaved in ways not possible in wage-labor economies that experienced high turnover. This data could lead to innovation and increased productivity in ways typically associated with capitalist business management. Rosenthal shows how the management of plantation systems in the West Indies and the United States mirrored advances that have been more closely followed in the field of traditional business history. She first reveals how eighteenth-century plantations in the West Indies were early models of the “multidivisional form” of organized and hierarchical production (p. 16). For Rosenthal, absentee ownership, particularly prevalent among English planters in the region, represented not so much decline but “a sign of sophistication and managerial complexity,” as a marker of separation between ownership and management (p. 43). Standardization and “paper technologies,” as Rosenthal describes them, allowed these accounting practices to circle the Anglo-Atlantic world (p. 63). Rosenthal excels at revealing how paper and people helped create standardized practices for the management of plantations. Preprinted forms in plantation ledger books made ideas travel well, as did young accountants with experience on the plantations. In the second half of the book, Rosenthal shows how the enslaved provided both the labor and the capital that allowed these systems to flourish. With their record keeping, some enslavers followed the value, depreciation, and markets for enslaved people as capital. Rosenthal argues that enslaved people were never completely commodified by slavery’s market because they were never “fully fungible” (p. 149). While enslavers followed the changing value of their human property, in ways similar to other long-term investments of the period, profit was not always readily apparent in relation to costs. Recording the value of the enslaved did provide economic opportunity in the form of mortgages and loans, which could also lead to investment and greater profits. Yet only through loans and sales could the value of the enslaved as human capital be used. What was often more important to enslavers was to improve methods to make the most efficient use of enslaved people’s labor. Productivity depended on early iterations of scientific management, agricultural advancements, and [End Page 472] control of the enslaved. Rosenthal’s work with plantation account books shows that “power enabled precise management” (p. 86). Tracking the work of the enslaved could make for more efficient labor systems. Enslavers and managers recorded data and experimented with planting techniques, punishment, and sometimes reward to increase production. The enslaved, however, were people who could stand in the way of even the most impressive innovations. As Rosenthal makes clear, each of these developments depended on power. This power was not absolute; the enslaved made themselves known as human beings rather than as perfectly willing parts of the plantation “as a kind of human machine” (p. 115). Yet the terror of slavery was routinized in ways that facilitated data collection and the implementation of new productivity schemes. In so many ways, technological advance depended on the enslaved and the violence enacted toward them. Rosenthal reminds readers throughout the book that even paperwork could enact its own chilling kind of brutality. These systems also depended on legal mechanisms that, of course, eventually changed. The capability of former enslavers to maintain such strict control over African Americans weakened during Reconstruction and through the Jim Crow era, but accounting as a mechanism of control remained and was used to the distinct disadvantage of those caught up in sharecropping, tenancy, and debt peonage. By exposing...