Caribbean Economic Thought: Advances, Retreat, Current Challenges

2021 ◽  
pp. 227797602110530
Author(s):  
Michael Witter
Keyword(s):  
Summer School ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Economic Welfare ◽  
Economic Knowledge ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Critical Tradition ◽  
The Caribbean

The reflections provided in this article were presented in the 4th Sam Moyo Memorial Lecture, delivered at the SMAIAS/ASN Summer School in January 2021. The article focuses on the critical tradition of economic knowledge and thought about the socio-economic development of the Caribbean, which began in the last decades of the colonial era. The advances made through the early Independence period were concerned with the problems of individual countries and the region as a whole. The objective was to improve the material economic welfare of the broad masses of Caribbean people while generating the requisite economic growth to sustain an improvement in the general conditions of life. From the thought of W. Arthur Lewis to the Plantation Economy theorists and subsequent critiques, a rich critical tradition emerged, only to be displaced by the onset of the debt crisis and neoliberalism. This article reviews the main elements of this critical tradition, its advances, and retreats, as well as the new challenges presented to it today.

Surinam Plantations in Dutch Archives

Itinerario ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-126
Author(s):  
Peter Boomgaard
Keyword(s):  
West Indies ◽  
Good News ◽  
University Of Minnesota ◽  
Indian History ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Indonesian Archipelago ◽  
Johns Hopkins University ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The University

The 1979 issue of Itinerario, (no. 2) opened with “A note on Suriname Plantation Archives at the University of Minnesota”, in which Richard Price of the Johns Hopkins University reported his discovery of some 2,000 manuscript pages on a number of Surinam plantations in the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. This, of course, is very good news. It is perhaps still better news that the Dutch archives contain vast and almost untapped (resources on a 200-odd plantations! I am, however, certainly not the first tone to make this ‘discovery’: Mrs. M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz not only mentioned it in her Ph.D. dissertation “Asian trade and European influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630”, but she even ordered part of the archives herself. It must be the unbridgeable gap between scholars interested in the East Indies /and those who study West Indian history, that her enthusiastic remarks on the availability of plantation material went unheeded. When nine years later Th. Mathews published his article “Los estuadios sobre historia economica del Caribe (1585 - 1910)”2, he mentioned the Dutch West Indies as a blank on the Caribbean map as far as economic (plantation) history is concerned. Since Mathews wrote his article the historiographic situation has improved only slightly, and it is an ironic comment on Surinam historical scholarship that tiny Curaçao's XlXth century plantation economy by now has found its historian, while the Surinam plantations are still in search of an author.

scholarly journals Into the Interior of Cultural Affiliations: Joan Anim Addo’s Imoinda and the Creolization of Modernity

2015 ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Mina Karavanta
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Caribbean Diaspora ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
New Concepts ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
A Site ◽  
British Culture

If creolization was represented as the property of the postcolonial world, the sign of hyphenated cultures emerging from the slave plantation economy and the slave trade, it has become a concept that names the transformation of the dominant cultures from within the other “minor” cultures and histories with which they have been living. Creolization emerges as the urgency to develop new concepts and disseminate “contrapuntal” and “affiliated” histories (Said) in order not only to narrate the Caribbean diaspora but also the social, political, and historical development of a wider British culture. In this light, this essay examines Imoinda: Or She Who Will Lose Her Name as a text that mediates between cultures represented as oppositional and operates as a site where their discrepant histories are translated, written anew, and rethought. The text as a site of translation and affiliation of different aesthetics, genres and traditions represents a new poetics of the human whose history is now narrated by the formerly dispossessed and expropriated other. The history of imperialism and slavery narrated of imperialism and slavery is an old narration but its telling is new for it generates new ways of understanding this history in the present where constituencies and communities of different cultural practices, often speaking different languages while sharing the language(s) of the dominant culture, are called forth to live together and live well.

scholarly journals Journal of the History of Economic Thought Preprints – A Win-Win Model of Development: How Indian Economics Redefined Universal Development from and at the Margins

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Bach
Keyword(s):  
Economic Thought ◽  
History Of Economic Thought ◽  
Economic Knowledge ◽  
Development Discourse ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
History Of Economics ◽  
The World ◽  
Elite Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Idea

In this article, I argue that looking at lesser known intellectuals can help history of economics uncover news ways of seeing the world. My focus is the beginnings of “Indian Economics” and its conceptualization of development. The Indian economists, despite their elite status in India, were from an imperial context where they were never considered economists. Studies throughout the 20th century continued to treat them only as nationalists, rarely as contributors to economic knowledge. My research gives agency to these economists. I show how the position of Indian Economics from the margins of discursive space offered a unique perspective that enabled it to discursively innovate at the margins of development discourse. Indian Economics redefined the concept of universality in the existing 19th century idea of development by rejecting the widely accepted comparative advantage model and assertion that progress originated in Europe. Moreover, the economists pushed for universal industrialization, even for imperial territories, arguing that universal progress was beneficial to all.

Slavery and the Pursuit of Freedom in 16th-Century Santo Domingo

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Lee Turits
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Empire ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Geographic Origins ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Freedom Suits

In the past, scholars of Latin America often assumed that Spanish colonists abandoned the Caribbean for the bullion riches of Mexico and Peru almost immediately after their conquest, while many Caribbeanists have imagined that Barbados, colonized by the British in the mid-1600s, was the “first black slave society.” Yet, in fact, more than a century earlier in the colony of Santo Domingo (then officially known as la Isla Española or simply la Española), European colonists built the first major American plantation economy and society made up mostly of enslaved people. Those held in chains on the island reached into the tens of thousands by the mid-1500s, and Santo Domingo became a pivotal crossroads in the early modern Atlantic. At first the enslaved population included thousands of people the Spanish called “Indians,” taken from other parts of the Caribbean and the Americas, and even an occasional enslaved person of European (Orthodox Christian or Muslim) descent. But after the mid-1500s slavery in Santo Domingo became isolated to people of African descent. This contrasted with the preexisting demography of slavery in southern Europe, where the enslaved were of more diverse geographic origins. Santo Domingo thus initiated a trajectory of racial and plantation slavery whose contours would shape the course of history in the Americas overall. Santo Domingo’s slave-based economy would also, though, be the first to collapse, at the end of the 16th century, partly because of sustained resistance by the enslaved—their continual escape and rebellion—that was costly for planters. The enslaved had composed most of society in the prior century. Now the majority were escaped and, to a lesser extent, freed slaves, living with substantial autonomy as independent peasants dispersed across the countryside. These themes are illuminated through an exploration of one of the earliest freedom suits in the Americas. This suit was won on appeal in Santo Domingo in 1531 through remarkable transatlantic collaboration by family members and sailors as well as through the evident power of notarized documents in the Spanish Empire.

Ecological Science in Latin America and the Caribbean

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Raby
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Life Histories ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Field Studies ◽  
Ecological Research ◽  
Forthcoming Article ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Latin American History ◽  
The Caribbean

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article. Fieldwork in Latin America and the Caribbean has played a major role in the development of the modern science of ecology––the study of organisms’ relationships with each other and the physical environment. Since the colonial era, natural historical knowledge grew and circulated through expeditions and naturalists’ encounters with indigenous and enslaved people’s environmental knowledge. Observations of the life histories, behavior, and geographical distribution of the regions’ species laid the groundwork for the emergence of ecology as a self-conscious discipline during the late 19th century. Major figures in the foundation of ecology were inspired by travel throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and especially by the large number and variety of species found in rainforests and other tropical areas. The growth of colonial and independent national scientific institutions––including botanical gardens, museums, and geographical surveys––also created important foundations for ecological research, although these were primarily oriented toward agricultural and economic improvement. As field stations specifically devoted to ecological research emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, long-term, place-based studies of living organisms became possible for the first time. Research at such institutions helped to shape key ecological concepts––including the ecological community, ecosystems, and species diversity––and contributed directly to the rise of the biodiversity ideal in conservation. Despite their historic importance, field studies in Latin America and the Caribbean remain significantly underrepresented in ecology today.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Chenoweth ◽  
James A. Delle ◽  
Lynsey A. Bates
Keyword(s):  
Common Life ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Innovative Techniques

The authors in this volume use innovative techniques and perspectives to reveal stories of spaces and times where the rules of the sugar lords did not always apply. Some of these “spaces in between” hide within plantation landscapes and some are revealed by alternate views of landscapes dominated by the plantation economy. These time periods and sites have received less attention than the experience of being an enslaved person on a large sugar estate in part because the latter was a very common life of an inhabitant of the Caribbean and because of the rich documentary resources associated with large plantations.

Making the Case for Equitable Growth: Comments on the 2020 David Gordon Memorial Lecture

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 610-615
Author(s):  
Katherine A. Moos
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
San Diego ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Theory Of Change ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Science Association ◽  
Social Science Association

In this piece, I comment on Heather Boushey’s David Gordon Memorial Lecture at the 2020 Allied Social Science Association meetings in San Diego. I identify the theory of change presented in Boushey’s lecture and discuss it in the context of contemporary economic thought. I argue that Boushey’s theory of change makes an important normative intervention in economics science. I evaluate Boushey’s theory of change from the perspective of philosophy of science as well as drawing on historical evidence.

Coffee and Rural Proletarianization: A Comment on Bergad

1984 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Brass
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Plantation Economy ◽  
Sugar Plantation ◽  
Wage Labour ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Labour Power

In a recent article in this journal, Dr Bergad argues that the production of coffee for the export economy in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico was accompanied by the emergence of a rural proletariat, and suggests that the latter process in fact predated the development of a sugar plantation economy in the twentieth century, with which capitalist free wage labour is commonly associated. This characterization of the coffee hacienda workforce raises definitional problems on which I would like to comment. This characterization of the coffee hacienda workforce raises definitional problems on which I would like to comment. Illustrating with examples from coffee-producing areas in Latin America and sugar-producing areas in the Caribbean, I shall argue that the increased demand for labour-power arising from the expansion of an export-oriented yet labour-intensive capitalist agriculture in a location where labour is scarce is met not by free wage labour but rather by recourse to unfree labour. In these circumstances, competition for labour-power results paradoxically in the attempt by capitalists to restrict the free movement of labour and the consequent formation of a free labour market.

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