The Caribbean Unbound: Cross-Atlantic Discourses on Slavery and Race

Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 By Richard S. Dunn University of North Carolina Press, 1972, 2000

The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism By Keith A. Sandiford Cambridge University Press, 2000

Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities Edited by Doris Y. Kadish The University of Georgia Press, 2000

C. L. R. James on the "Negro Question" Edited by Scott McLemee University Press of Mississippi, 1996

When Richard S. Dunn first published Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 in 1972, the anglophone Caribbean was increasingly being recast in terms of consanguinity by US colonial history scholars. Since then other major publications and new scholarly trends and terminologies—postcolonial, black Atlantic, circum-Atlantic, New World—have continued to map the islands as a crucial, even originating, site of modern colonization and slave trade in the Western hemisphere. Despite the catchy main title, sugar and slaves get less attention than the subtitle, even as Dunn claims that the ascendance of the planter class began with the switch from growing tobacco to sugar manufacture and with the subsequent "eager embrace of African slavery" (46). History written from the point of view of the slave was rare in that period. C. L. R. James's prefatory note to the revised second edition of The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1963) highlights the problem of perspective in the field. Tracing a heritage of Caribbean revolution in the Americas and beyond (as James does in the added appendix, "From Toussaint L'Ouverture to Fidel Castro") was, James realizes, against the grain of scholarship of the time. "Writers on the West Indies always relate them to their approximation to Britain, France, Spain and America, that is to say, to Western civilization, never in relation to their own history," states this avowedly cosmopolitan intellectual. Years after the official end of transatlantic slavery, the history of the Caribbean still tends to radiate dimly outward. The task of presenting the Caribbean in its global dimensions without reducing it to supporting cast on the world stage or undermining its autonomy remains a formidable one for scholars in the US academy.

The reissue of Dunn's book 28 years after its first publication loses little in the interim, suggesting not only the enduring value of Dunn's pathbreaking scholarship, but the unnerving persistence of the debates that resonate in Caribbean studies almost three decades later. This is not to argue that Dunn's colorful and lively portrait of the early colonial Caribbean is without its inconsistencies, errors, and sweeping generalizations, or that later work has not proved at least some of the dubious claims in the book wrong. Dunn himself is refreshingly candid about the speculative nature of his analysis, given that one of the reasons for the originality of the work when it first appeared lay in the often imaginative reconstruction of sketchy and unorthodox sources. Noting the relative paucity of seventeenth-century writings on the English sugar islands (synchronically compared to the early New England Puritans and diachronically compared to later periods in Caribbean colonial history), Dunn then ambitiously charts much of his scholarly terrain through tax returns, census lists, vestry records, passenger lists, parish lists ("[n]o doubt . . . riddled with error" [90]), filed affidavits for reparation from losses at the plantation office, "patents, plat books, wills, deeds, inventories" (166), even tombstones. He is not in the least bashful about the shakiness of some of the sources, confessing that "seventeenth-century commercial statistics are notoriously unreliable" and government records "spotty, confused . . . contradictory" (201). Such disarming honesty (would that more scholars were as modest about their foundational claims) does not have a disingenuous ring, because it anticipates what several Caribbean writers and critics have expressed as their "quarrel" with a colonial history...