Slavery without Sugar: Diversity in Caribbean Economy and Society Since the 17th Century (review)

This collection of eleven essays sets out to expand the discussion of slavery in the Caribbean. Traditionally, Caribbean societies have been defined on the basis of a plantation economic model that stresses the monocultural production and export of sugar while minimizing the role of other productive sectors. By pluralizing the discourse on Caribbean and Latin American economic and social history, this volume attempts to insert a "discourse of diversification within Caribbean societies during the operation of enslavement" (6). To this effect, it focuses on rural and urban contexts of non-sugar production within which the enslaved lived and worked throughout the Caribbean (for example, Haiti, Belize, Cuba, Barbados, Jamaica, Bahamas, and Puerto Rico).

One important example of this phenomenon occurred with the emergence of the livestock industry, which predated the production of sugar in Jamaica. Using cartographic evidence, Barry Higman makes a contribution to Jamaican economic history by describing the changing functions, as well as the size, shape, land use, and field patterns, of cattle farms and ranches, known since the seventeenth century as pens. In their essay examining penkeepers and coffee farmers in Jamaica, Shepherd and Kathleen E. A. Monteith challenge the argument that plantation societies had "limited possibilities for internal capital accumulation" because they lacked an important domestic market (82). They note that Jamaican penkeepers and coffee farmers, who were more diverse in terms of race, color, and gender than the sugar planters, played a significant role in the local economic and political context.

Sugar production was largely absent elsewhere in the Caribbean. O. Nigel Bolland's essay illustrates that in Belize, British settlers (known as Baymen) utilized slavery primarily for the extraction of timber, mostly logwood and mahogany, which gave rise to an organization of labor different from that of sugar and cotton plantations. Consequently, a number of distinct tasks and skills (such as huntsmen, axemen, and cattlemen) emerged that are not often associated with the representation of slave labor. Like Belize, as Gail Saunders points out in her contribution, the Bahamas was not a plantation colony that commercially produced sugar. Attempts to make cotton into a staple crop failed, and the enslaved population, in a semi-peasant status, ended up producing provisions for the Nassau market.

Other essays in this collection attempt to reorient our perspective on Caribbean slavery by examining lives of the enslaved in urban contexts. Pedro Welch details how slaves in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Barbados, though hardly in idyllic circumstances, "handled their enslaver's money and their own; they acquired skills that offered them some autonomy on the job; they worked in maritime occupations that offered them options not widely available in the rural environment" (195). Further complicating our image of slavery, Hilary Beckles illustrates how in Barbados the urban environment facilitated Black ownership of slaves, a "complex socioeconomic arrangement that promoted the quest for property accumulation." It also "enabled some blacks to engage in a desperate attempt at family reconstitution, kinship protection, and social inclusion" (220).

On the whole, these essays make a significant contribution in broadening our understanding of Caribbean slavery beyond the "evolutionary model advanced by the Plantation Economy School" (12), although they do not supplant its central thesis that the plantation system ordered the social, political, economic, and symbolic reality of not only the Caribbean but also of the Americas in general.