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  • De los bueyes al vapor: caminos de la tecnología en Puerto Rico y el Caribe
  • Daniel B. Rood
Lizette Cabrera Salcedo. 2010. De los bueyes al vapor: caminos de la tecnología en Puerto Rico y el Caribe. San Juan: La Editorial, Universidad de Puerto Rico. 497 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8477-1131-4.

With this thoroughly researched, carefully argued history of technology of nineteenth century Puerto Rico, Lizette Cabrera Salcedo has mostly succeeded in challenging the notion that the Caribbean island was technologically and scientifically stagnant until the U.S. occupation in 1898. In the century-and-a-half preceding that fateful date, the author demonstrates, a small but dynamic group of Puerto Rican scientists, surveyors, engineers, and planter-inventors collaborated with a mostly supportive Iberian metropole to modernize the production of sugar—by far the island’s most important export commodity. Requiring irrigation projects, hydrological and geological surveys, soil analysis, and broad engineering acumen, as well as the more familiar struggles of modernizing activities in the sugar mill itself, Puerto Rico’s “creole model of economic development” put the island squarely in the currents of the Industrial Revolution, broadly construed.

The framing of the book is interesting: Cabrera uses the multi-century history of a particular human invention (the three–cylinder mill used to squeeze sweet juice out of raw sugarcane) as a useful trope through which to explain Puerto Rican economic and social history. Changes in the relationship between colony and metropole, slavery and capitalism, island and mainland are related to the contraption’s ongoing redesign both in terms of its shape and size and in terms of the materials used to construct it. Most important to Cabrera are changes over time in terms of the motive force that was used to turn the cylinders: from oxen to steam engines, as the book’s title implies (with a minor but important parenthesis for waterpower). In its use of an object (at once commodity and machine) as metaphor for colonial and postcolonial history, De los bueyes al vapor reminds of the memorable narrative strategy used in Fernando Ortiz’s classic Contrapunteo cubano (2002).

The question of who invented, or improved, this all-important mechanism, as well as other sugar-related technologies, occupies much of the author’s attention. In the early chapters, which offer a fascinating global tour of sugar manufacture since ancient times, Cabrera corrects [End Page 243] scholars who have missed the major contribution of Luso- and Hispanic-American predecessors to the British, Dutch and French Caribbean sugar islands in the seventeenth-century. She thus compellingly recasts the European “wars beyond the line” as conflicts over sugar: those who lacked it (or the wherewithal to produce it) attacked those who had it. She also offers a tantalizing footnote about the hitherto unexplored role of inter-imperial contraband trade in early modern technology transfer in the Caribbean (p. 79, note 57).

When she moves to the eighteenth century, Cabrera continues to give the reader a rich, pan-Caribbean picture of sugar technology, expanding geographically on the important recent work of Mercedes García (2007), which similarly seeks to challenge the notion that there wasn’t much going on in the Spanish-American sugar industry until after 1790. If the takeoff of French, English and Dutch sugar exports in the early seventeenth-century was indebted to the know-how of Spanish colonials, the roles were reversed in the mid-eighteenth century. The Spanish government’s willingness to allow the immigration of foreign experts, as well as the duty-free importation of foreign hardware, would turn out to have important effects. Cabrera brings to life the business-minded scientists who capitalized on the Bourbonist support of freer trade, as well as the educational, cultural, scientific Alantic worlds of which they were part. Juan Ramos, a native of Puerto Rico who traveled widely in support of his sugar-related inventions, or the ecologically-prescient geographer Francisco Valls are fascinating characters who have received too little attention in a Caribbean historiography overwhelmingly preoccupied with masters and slaves.

The “who invented it?” conundrum, long the overriding concern of traditional historians of technology such as Lynn White, is turned in...

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