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History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World

2010; Duke University Press; Volume: 90; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-126

1527-1900

Dale Tomich,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

In this clearly written and comprehensive narrative, Frank Moya Pons provides an alternative to fragmented national histories and monographic local approaches to the Caribbean by presenting an encompassing narrative that treats the region as a unified whole. He is particularly successful in integrating the histories of the Hispanic and non-His-panic Caribbean, which all too often fall into separate historiographies. Sugar provides the thread that integrates the region’s economic, social, and demographic history across space and over time. However, Moya Pons does not examine either sugar or the Caribbean from a narrowly economic point of view but rather treats them as the focus of international political rivalry, war, and diplomacy. From this perspective, he reconstructs the ways in which the unifying element of the sugar plantation produced the economic, social, and demographic diversity that characterizes the region.The book begins with an account of the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean. The early chapters are especially interesting because they put Spanish activities in Hispaniola at the center of Spain’s early colonization efforts, in contrast to more general histories that emphasize the conquest and colonization of Mexico and Peru. Gold, not sugar, was the focus of Spain’s initial efforts in the Caribbean. Sugar production emerged in the 1520s only as an alternative to the rapidly depleted mining industry. However, despite its early appearance, the Spanish experiment with sugar was not the beginning of the Caribbean’s long and fateful association with sugar. The early Spanish sugar industry was relatively successful, but the quantities produced were low. Technology and specialists in sugar refining were imported from the Mediterranean and Atlantic sugar industry, while the workforce was comprised of surviving encomienda Indians, whose diminished numbers were supplemented by imported African slaves. By the 1580s, the Spanish Caribbean sugar was surpassed by the Portuguese colonies of São Tomé and Brazil.With the decline of sugar and the breakdown of trade routes, the Spanish Caribbean entered a cycle of economic decline and demographic crisis. The rural population increasingly engaged in contraband in cattle and hides with assorted English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese privateers, traders, and smugglers. In order to suppress this activity, the Spanish authorities removed the population from northern and western Hispaniola. This disastrous policy left not only feral cattle, but also large tracts of domesticated land available to foreign interlopers. Spanish policy also encouraged flight into the interior, creating an impoverished subsistence peasantry of mixed physical and cultural origins anxious to escape control and taxation of the central authority.Moya Pons emphasizes the role of pirates, privateers, smugglers, and traders together with interstate conflict in breaking Spain’s monopoly of political power in the Caribbean and establishing English, French, and Dutch sovereignty over the islands of the eastern Caribbean as well as Jamaica and western Hispaniola. Moya Pons carefully analyzes the evolution of these islands from pirate havens to tobacco-planting colonies with dependent European labor forces. Sugar production was definitively established when, upon their expulsion from Brazil, the Dutch brought sugar, slaves, new technologies, credit, and access to markets to Barbados, Martinique, and Guadeloupe. The sugar plantation and large-scale importation of African slaves marginalized or displaced European smallholders and tobacco cultivation in British and French colonies and created the first Caribbean “sugar islands.” By the 1740s, the large islands of Saint Domingue and Jamaica became the epicenters of sugar production. Sugar became the most valuable commodity in international trade, and the sugar economies of the British and French Caribbean expanded continuously over the next century, creating slave societies with black majorities.Moya Pons draws attention to the importance of war and imperial politics in creating conditions for the expansion of the sugar industry. Britain and France effectively eliminated the Dutch power in the Caribbean through war and the imposition of mercantilist policies. From the Seven Years’ War (1756 – 63) until the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815), Britain and France contended with one another for imperial domination of the Caribbean and North America. This was the period of most rapid growth of the Caribbean sugar industry, and there was marked tension between unprecedented economic expansion and metropolitan control over the colonial economies. United States independence disrupted the organization of Britain’s mercantilist economy in the Americas while the Haitian Revolution ended France’s colonial ambitions in the New World. The revolution in Haiti abolished slavery, destroyed the plantation system, and created a black peasantry that had to confront the exactions of the newly independent state in the context of isolation from the global economy. In the British Caribbean, abolitionism ended the slave trade. Many of the older colonies declined but new ones were added to the empire. With emancipation, many former slaves established themselves as smallholding peasants, while in the new colonies, especially Trinidad and Guiana, indentured Asian labor was imported to sustain the growth of the sugar industry. Reconstituted peasantries and rural working classes formed the majority in these post-emancipation societies.During the first half of the nineteenth century, sugar production increased in Puerto Rico and especially Cuba. Cuba took advantage of the void created by the destruction of the Saint Domingue sugar industry and emerged as the world’s leading producer by the 1830s. Sugar production was mechanized during this period and Cuba was best able to take advantage of the new technologies. Despite the disruptions of the Ten Years’ War, Cuban sugar production continued to increase. Nonetheless there was mounting pressure from various sources on the illegal slave trade and slavery itself. By emancipating children and the elderly, the Moret Law of 1869 limited the growth of the slave population in the sugar zones. The Patronage Law of 1880 attempted to guarantee the labor supply by instituting a system of apprenticeship and gradual emancipation, but accelerated the dissolution of slavery. The era of independent plantations ended with the abolition of slavery in 1886. Planters throughout the Caribbean began to establish centralized sugar mills and to experiment with new labor arrangements in the face of growing world competition.Moya Pons concludes the book by analyzing the construction of the American sugar empire. U.S. intervention in the Cuban War of Independence in 1898 initiated a new cycle of expansion of the Caribbean sugar economy. The United States seized control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic and imposed a different political status on each. Intervention opened the way for massive American investment, unprecedented expansion of production, and the formation of giant sugar centrales across the region. Sugar production in the Spanish Caribbean was integrated into the U.S. market under the control of the American “Sugar Trust.” This restructuring of the Caribbean sugar industry was linked to complex processes of regional and international migration, proletarianization, peasant and middle-class formation, and development of new tropical exports such as bananas, coffee, and tobacco; and contributed to the further development of social, cultural, and political complexity that characterizes the Caribbean region.