Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence
AM217
Lecture 5: Plantations in the Atlantic world
Having considered the beginnings of the Caribbean ‘sugar revolution’ in the previous
lecture and seminar, this week we will address the key characteristics of plantations
and the societies they came to dominate. A particular concern is to locate Caribbean
plantations within wider Atlantic networks and systems. The slave trade was crucial
here, but we will save that for lecture 6.
Lecture structure
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2.
3.
4.
5.
Defining a plantation society
Factories in the field
Plantation societies
Plantations in the wider world
Plantations as modern spaces
Fundamental features of a plantation society
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Specialised ‘monocrop’ production undertaken solely for (foreign) sale.
Plantation monopoly over major factors of production and privileged access to
auxiliary infrastructural and institutional resources.
Export orientation, capital specificity and rigidity, foreign ‘metropolitan’
ownership and/or control, and economic, political and psychological
dependence on the mother country
Import dependence
Masses of unskilled labour
A caste system based on race and colour (and white bias)
Concentration of power in a tiny elite; authoritarian, highly centralized
government (‘plantocracy’)
(from George Beckford, Persistent Poverty, 1972)
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Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence
AM217
Spatial organisation
The wealth of the plantations
The plantation system which extirpated the yeoman farmers of the non-Hispanic
Antilles and scourged West Africa for centuries richly rewarded its organizers. The
wealth produced by African slaves on land wrested from Arawak and Carib Indians
flowed into the European metropolises in great rivers, nourishing infant industry,
making possible the foundation of great families, and supporting the growth and
spread of culture and civilization in the form of universities, libraries, museums, and
symphony orchestras. Plantation products also did their part for Western civilization.
West Indian tobacco, coffee, sugar, and rum, together with Indian tea, were effective
fare for factory workers of Britain and France, quelling their hunger pangs and
numbing their outrage.
Sidney Mintz, quoted in B. Richardson, The Caribbean in the wider world, 1492-1992
(1992), p. 39.
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Caribbean History: From Colonialism to Independence
AM217
Sugar and the ‘big fix’
There was an unprecedented growth in demand for tropical foodstuffs, especially
sugar, in Western Europe in the late seventeenth and especially eighteenth
centuries. The consequences were dramatic:
1. Physiological effects – this stimulant was favoured in the industrial era
because it ‘provided quick energy…when more intense and prolonged
performance was demanded from the human body’ (Eric Wolf, Europe and
the People without History, 1982, p. 333). It may also have been addictive.
2. New patterns of consumption – New higher-class patterns of sociability and
consumption emerged (e.g. coffeehouses and teashops) and were emulated
by others.
3. Socialising functions – Sidney Mintz (Sweetness and Power, 1985) argues
that ‘tea time’ and ‘coffee breaks’ helped to condition European working
people to the time-discipline demanded by the industrial revolution.
The Caribbean as a theatre of war: Martinique
1625-1762 – held by the French after its initial colonisation.
1762-1763 – captured by the British during the Seven Years’ War (the first global
conflict).
1763-1794 – returned to France after the Treaty of Paris (1763). In exchange for
Martinique (and Guadeloupe), France cedes its North American territory
(French Canada) to Britain.
1794-1802 – re-captured by the British during the French Revolutionary Wars.
1802-1809 – returned to France.
1809-1814 – re-captured by the British during the Napoleonic Wars.
1814 onwards – returned to France.
Plantations as modern spaces
[S]ince the inauguration of the slave plantation West Indians were, above all else, a
modern people. They lived in subjugation. But they experienced modernisation – in
the Middle Passage and on the plantation – at its most dynamic, at its highest pitch
and at its most brutal.
B. Schwarz, West Indian intellectuals in Britain (2003), p. 5.
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