What Price Sugar? Land, Labor, and Revolution

2008 ◽  
Vol 81 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

[First paragraph]Sugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States. Bernard Moitt (ed.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. vii + 203 pp. (Cloth US $ 65.00)Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. (Paper US $ 22.50)These two books illustrate the fascination that sugar, slavery, and the plantation still exercise over the minds of scholars. One of them also reflects an interest in the influence these have had on the modern world. For students of the history of these things the Schwartz collection is in many ways the more useful. It seeks to fill a lacuna left by the concentration of monographs on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that we know less about the history of sugar than we thought we did. Perhaps in no other single place is such a range of information on so wide an area presented in such detail for so early a period. Ranging from Iberia to the Caribbean and including consumption as well as production of sugar, with a nod to the slave trade and a very useful note on weights and currencies, this volume is a gold mine of information. It considers (briefly) the theoretical meaning as well as the growing of this important crop, contrasting its production in Iberia with that on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, colonized by Iberian powers, and continuing the contrast with São Tomé, off the coast of Africa, and on to Brazil and the Spanish American empire before ending with the British in Barbados. In the transit, it of necessity considers and complicates the meaning of “sugar revolution” and shows how scholars using that term do not always mean the same thing. John McCusker and Russell Menard, for example, tackling a cornerstone of the traditional interpretation of the development of sugar, argue that there was no “sugar revolution” in Barbados; economic change had already begun before sugar’s advent, though sugar may have accelerated it, and yet sugar production was transformed on the island. They also undercut, without quite denying, the significance of the Dutch role in the process. Schwartz, while questioning, lings to the traditional expression if not the traditional outlook, seeing in Barbados “the beginning of the sugar revolution” (p. 10).

scholarly journals What Price Sugar? Land, Labor, and Revolution

2007 ◽  
Vol 81 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 79-84
Author(s):  
Daniel C. Littlefield
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Sugar Production ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

[First paragraph]Sugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States. Bernard Moitt (ed.). Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. vii + 203 pp. (Cloth US $ 65.00)Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Stuart B. Schwartz (ed.). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. (Paper US $ 22.50)These two books illustrate the fascination that sugar, slavery, and the plantation still exercise over the minds of scholars. One of them also reflects an interest in the influence these have had on the modern world. For students of the history of these things the Schwartz collection is in many ways the more useful. It seeks to fill a lacuna left by the concentration of monographs on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suggesting that we know less about the history of sugar than we thought we did. Perhaps in no other single place is such a range of information on so wide an area presented in such detail for so early a period. Ranging from Iberia to the Caribbean and including consumption as well as production of sugar, with a nod to the slave trade and a very useful note on weights and currencies, this volume is a gold mine of information. It considers (briefly) the theoretical meaning as well as the growing of this important crop, contrasting its production in Iberia with that on the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Canaries, colonized by Iberian powers, and continuing the contrast with São Tomé, off the coast of Africa, and on to Brazil and the Spanish American empire before ending with the British in Barbados. In the transit, it of necessity considers and complicates the meaning of “sugar revolution” and shows how scholars using that term do not always mean the same thing. John McCusker and Russell Menard, for example, tackling a cornerstone of the traditional interpretation of the development of sugar, argue that there was no “sugar revolution” in Barbados; economic change had already begun before sugar’s advent, though sugar may have accelerated it, and yet sugar production was transformed on the island. They also undercut, without quite denying, the significance of the Dutch role in the process. Schwartz, while questioning, lings to the traditional expression if not the traditional outlook, seeing in Barbados “the beginning of the sugar revolution” (p. 10).

HURRICANES, CROPS, AND CAPITAL: THE METEOROLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE IN THE WEST INDIES

2016 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 418-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jamie L. Pietruska
Keyword(s):  
West Indian ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Empire ◽  
The West ◽  
Knowledge Infrastructure ◽  
Military Security ◽  
Symbolic Extension ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Weather Service

This article examines the mutually reinforcing imperatives of government science, capitalism, and American empire through a history of the U.S. Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service at the turn of the twentieth century. The original impetus for expanding American meteorological infrastructure into the Caribbean in 1898 was to protect naval vessels from hurricanes, but what began as a measure of military security became, within a year, an instrument of economic expansion that extracted climatological data and produced agricultural reports for American investors. This article argues that the West Indian weather service was a project of imperial meteorology that sought to impose a rational scientific and bureaucratic order on a region that American officials considered racially and culturally inferior, yet relied on the labor of local observers and Cuban meteorological experts in order to do so. Weather reporting networks are examined as a material and symbolic extension of American technoscientific power into the Caribbean and as a knowledge infrastructure that linked the production of agricultural commodities in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the world of commodity exchange in the United States.

National politics and ethnic identity in the Dominican Republic

2002 ◽  
Vol 76 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 105-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Paulino
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
University Of North Carolina ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
National Politics ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
The Caribbean

[First paragraph]The Struggle of Democratie Politics in the Dominican Republic. JONATHAN HARTLYN. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xxi + 371 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95, Paper US$ 17.95)Holocaust in the Caribbean: The Slaughter of 25,000 Haitians by Trujillo in One Week. MIGUEL AQUINO. Waterbury CT: Emancipation Press, 1997. xxii +184 pp. (Paper n.p.)Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. ERNESTO SAGAS. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xii +161 pp. (Cloth US$ 49.95)Azücar, Arabes, cocolos y haitianos. ORLANDO INOA. Santo Domingo: Ed. Cole and FLACSO, 1999. 219 pp. (Paper n.p.)Over the last few years there has been an increase in the publication of books about the Dominican Republic and Dominicans in the United States. This can be partly attributed to the increase of Dominican communities.1 Moreover, Dominican and Dominican-American writers who underscore the trials and tribulations of the immigrant experience are becoming more visible in the mainstream print.2

Isles of Noise

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra Bronfman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Media History ◽  
Virtual Laboratory ◽  
American Empire ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Cold War

In this media history of the Caribbean, Alejandra Bronfman traces how technology, culture, and politics developed in a region that was "wired" earlier and more widely than many other parts of the Americas. Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica acquired radio and broadcasting in the early stages of the global expansion of telecommunications technologies. Imperial histories helped forge these material connections through which the United States, Great Britain, and the islands created a virtual laboratory for experiments in audiopolitics and listening practices. As radio became an established medium worldwide, it burgeoned in the Caribbean because the region was a hub for intense foreign and domestic commercial and military activities. Attending to everyday life, infrastructure, and sounded histories during the waxing of an American empire and the waning of British influence in the Caribbean, Bronfman does not allow the notion of empire to stand solely for domination. By the time of the Cold War, broadcasting had become a ubiquitous phenomenon that rendered sound and voice central to political mobilization in the Caribbean nations throwing off what remained of their imperial tethers.

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