We will be using Moodle for this module, however, you won't be able to access it until 1 October, so here is the work for our seminar in week 1...

In this seminar, we will discuss the defining features of Caribbean societies and focus in on the two most important colonies in the late eighteenth century: French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica.

Please read all 3 Essential Readings (available via Talis Aspire and below) and then consider the following questions:

• What were main the similarities and differences between the development of the plantation system in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue?
• What were the effects of the transition to sugarcane cultivation in the Caribbean?
• What did Sidney Mintz mean when he described the Caribbean as a 'societal area'?

Essential Readings

Trevor G. Burnard and John D. Garrigus, The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica (2016), pp 25-49 (Note for students'The plantation world'). [available online]

Sidney W. Mintz, 'The Caribbean as a Sociocultural Area', Journal of World History, 9 (1966), pp. 912-37.

Frank Moya Pons, History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (2007), pp 95-109 ('Caribbean sugar economies in the Eighteenth Century').