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

In this short book, Menard tackles two substantial problems in Caribbean historiography. His primary objective is to flesh out the experience of Barbados in the 1640s, the decade in which historians have long identified a fundamental transformation from nascent settler society to quintessential plantation economy. In this crucial phase of English colonization, beginning in 1627, the island has been seen as moving from an agrarian economy based on small landholdings and a range of export crops—such as tobacco, cotton, and indigo—to an economy driven by sugar monoculture.

By the 1650s, this world had been turned upside down, the land of Barbados now dominated by large, integrated sugar plantations, and indentured white workers replaced by enslaved Africans. The far-reaching character of this economic and demographic transformation created a model, followed quickly in most of the French, English, and Danish colonies in the Caribbean, more slowly in the Spanish islands, and more reluctantly in the colonies of the Dutch. The metamorphosis for which Barbados is commonly taken to be the archetype has come to be known as the "sugar revolution," and it is a critique of this key concept of Caribbean historiography that forms Menard's second objective.

Menard argues that, contrary to the received interpretation, "Barbados was already on its way to becoming a plantation economy and a slave society" even before sugar came to replace the early export crops (4). In his view, sugar merely accelerated and intensified existing tendencies; he prefers the term "sugar boom" to "sugar revolution." He devotes a chapter to the financing of the boom and argues that the Dutch were not as important in supplying capital as some historians have claimed. Easy as it is to agree with this conclusion, it is a red herring because sources of finance are not fundamental to the sugar revolution concept. Menard's interpretation of the relationship between sugar production and prices is valuable, as is his account of the evolution of the large-scale integrated plantation. He also analyzes important new data from the deed books at the Barbados National Archives. In the end, however, he describes his task as "more to raise questions than to settle them" (xiii).

Menard views his critique of the "sugar revolution" concept much like he does his account of Barbados, as more provocative than definitive, though he does contend at points that the concept deserves only to be consigned to the "historiographic dustbin" (5). The findings of Sweet Negotiations seem insufficient to justify too hasty a discard. The concept could probably survive even if nothing important happened in Barbados. Certainly Menard's critique is useful, but the "sugar revolution" retains a good deal of substance and utility and seems likely to persist along with other disputed, so-called social and economic revolutions that historians deploy to make sense of the past.