Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations

Abstract

“This book is mostly a meditation, a personal look back,” Sidney Mintz confesses, “not weighty scholarship” (p. 24). Despite the modest disclaimer, the text sheds light on the characteristics that set the Caribbean apart in world history while also highlighting the diversity within the region. Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico each followed distinctive historical trajectories, Mintz tells us, which intertwined and overlapped economically, socially, and politically.What distinguished the region, Mintz argues, was the development of large-scale sugar plantations and the use of African slavery to cultivate the crops—what he calls the “plantation complex” (p. 12). This oppressive system encouraged the development of regimented and hierarchical conceptions of race, skin color, and social difference. Plantations and slavery shaped the colonies in ways that would last even after the collapse of these economies.Mintz combines anthropological and historical methods seamlessly to “make my own sense out of the past” and to learn how the past continues to be experienced in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico (p. 22). To understand the specificity of these societies, he focuses on church-founded peasant villages in Jamaica, rural market women in Haiti, and workers on American-owned sugar plantations in Puerto Rico. This comparative approach reveals key distinctions among the three societies and therefore how the chronology of economic development was central to both the similarities and differences across the region. The rise of plantation economies in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries set them on a different path from Puerto Rico and the Hispanic triad (which also included Cuba and Santo Domingo). Sugar only became a core feature of the Hispanic triad in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, under the ownership of American investors.The development of the sugar plantation complex in Jamaica and Haiti in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was paired with the emergence of a secondary economy in which masters forced slaves to cultivate their own subsistence crops. These crops provided the basis for the creation of a local market economy that shaped the future of the societies in important ways. The cultivation of these small plots of land produced what Mintz calls a “proto-peasantry.”Where Jamaica and Haiti differ, as Mintz highlights, is in the postemancipation period, during which the determining factor was access to land. Since Jamaica remained a colony long after emancipation, the state and the elite were able to continue to extract labor from the ex-slaves who were prevented from gaining access to land. This system therefore blocked the development of a peasant society. On the other hand, Haiti, as a result of the government’s inability to exert power, progressed in the nineteenth century into a peasant society in which the government extracted taxes but was otherwise unable to prevent the occupation of the land by laborers.In contrast to both Jamaica and Haiti, Puerto Rico remained a largely undervalued colony in the Spanish empire until the nineteenth century, when sugar cultivation boomed. By this time, however, slavery was in decline and Puerto Rico already had a poor white laboring class; the labor force, therefore, was a mixture of white, black, and mixed-race people. This meant that the strict racial hierarchies that existed in Jamaica and Haiti did not develop with the rise of sugar in Puerto Rico.Throughout the book, the uniqueness of the Caribbean experience is a consistent theme. In the concluding chapter, Mintz revisits the uses of the terms creole and creolization to argue that the terms reflect the specificity of the Caribbean experience. “Creolization, as the process by which slaves dealt with the immediate postenslavement trauma they faced,” cannot, he argues, be applied to cultural contact and change elsewhere in the world (p. 205). Creolization, Mintz reminds us, was the result of violence against and control of heterogeneous groups who “responded creatively to the condition” (p. 197). The social institutions that they built in response to the plantation complex have remained central to Caribbean societies ever since.Since Mintz offers compelling overarching arguments about the region while also leaving room for debate, expansion, and further comparisons, this book will be an excellent choice for both undergraduate and graduate courses. Students will gain a deep appreciation of the centrality of the Caribbean in world history and especially of the roles of Haiti, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica in the increasing globalization of the early modern period. Moreover, readers will learn about the distinctiveness of the region, such as the differences between slavery in the Caribbean and the US South. Along the way, they will see the enduring connections between the past and the present and will understand the importance of interdisciplinary scholarship.