Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (review)

Russell Menard's new book shows how attention to detail, frequenting the archives, and consulting local sources can discredit long-held historical verities and change the way scholars assess historical relationships. He applies to Barbados the methodology of the Chesapeake school, which he along with scholars such as Lois Green Carr and Lorena Walsh among others perfected, and whose demographic studies have changed our view of immigration to Maryland and Virginia. He pays close attention to the situation on the island rather than relying on what people there and elsewhere wrote to the metropolis. From that vantage point, he rejects the notion of a so-called "sugar revolution" in Barbados (the long-held explanation for social transformation of the island), denies that the Dutch funded the economic changes taking place, disproves the assumption that the local economy was in decline before the advent of sugar, and reassess the relationship among sugar, slavery, and plantation agriculture. Many of the ideas he calls into question have been the staple of histories of European overseas expansion for decades. All the books say so and therefore it must be true that, forced out of Brazil by a Portuguese resurgence, the Dutch took the knowledge and implements of sugar cultivation to the Caribbean, supplied both the necessary labor and the financing to revive a moribund economy in Barbados, and, consequently, were an essential element in the transfer of leadership in sugar production from the continent to the islands. The story has a longer pedigree than the regular iteration of modern historians, however, being asserted as early as the seventeenth century. Richard Ligon, in A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1647), first advanced the notion of Dutch influence with a desire to illustrate the success and advantage of an open trade system in hope of discouraging the restrictive mercantile policies contemplated by the English government. As an "original" source, it was given more credence or accorded less scrutiny than it ought to have had. Historians thus disregarded one of the first rules of historical research, which is to question the documents and to interrogate the motives of those who write them and to compare contemporary descriptions with other sources of information.

Menard makes it clear that he did not set out to question the common wisdom. He merely desired to add precision to the dating of sugar's dominance and the transition from servant to slave labor in order to compare with similar processes on the mainland. However, the Barbados National Archives offered no evidence that the Dutch had lent the Barbadians money or sold them slaves. Instead, he found that London merchants and local prosperity had financed the transition to sugar production. Moreover, countering the usual argument, African slavery and plantation agriculture had come before sugar. What Menard chooses to call a "sugar boom" was largely financed by men growing cotton, tobacco, and indigo, and sugar quickened a transformation in the economy that was already underway. Sugar triumphed out of agricultural diversity rather than economic morbidity, and the process of estate consolidation began with cotton. In fact, after an agricultural slump, the transition to sugar slowed down when prosperity returned to tobacco and cotton in the 1640s. Nor was the move to African labor accompanied by an immediate decrease in the importation of white indentured servants. Rather, the servant population rose in concert with the slave population until the 1650s, though outpaced by the number of slaves, and continued until the call for servants outran the supply. In other words, increased demand rather than a change in labor fashions or primary crop explains the switch from servants to slaves and Africanization of the island.

Menard expresses satisfaction not to be "tilting alone" against the notion of a sugar revolution in Barbados. Michael Craton also demurs. Moreover, Menard credits Hillary Beckles and others at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies...