Having considered the beginnings of the Caribbean ‘sugar revolution’ in the previous lecture and seminar, this week we will address the key characteristics of plantations and the societies they came to dominate. A particular concern is to locate Caribbean plantations within wider Atlantic networks and systems. The slave trade was crucial here, but we will save that for lecture 6.

Reading list

Beckford, George L., Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (Oxford, 1972).

Burnard, Trevor G., and John D. Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

* Carrington, Selwyn H. N. and Ronald C. Noel, ‘Slaves and Tropical Commodities’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 231-245.

Hamilton, Douglas, ‘Rivalry, War, and Imperial Reform in the 18th-Century Caribbean’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 261-272.

Harrison, Michelle, King Sugar: Jamaica, the Caribbean and the World Sugar Economy (London, 2001).

Higman, Barry W., A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2011), chapter 3.

Knight, Franklin W., The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (Oxford, 1990, 2nd edition), pp. 66-87.

Leonard, Adrian and David Pretel (eds), The Caribbean and the Atlantic World Economy: Circuits of Trade, Money and Knowledge, 1650-1914 (Basingstoke, 2015).

Moya Pons, Frank, History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (London, 2007), chapters 8, 9 and 10.

Mintz, Sidney Wilfred, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985).

Newman, Simon P., A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).

Rodney, Walter, 'African Slavery and other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Context of the Atlantic Slave-Trade', The Journal of African History, 7(3) (1966), pp. 431-443.

Rood, Daniel B., The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

Schwartz, Stuart B. (ed.), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill, 2004).