Shepherd, Verene A., ed.
Slavery Without Sugar: Diversity
in Caribbean Economy and Society Since the 17th Century.
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002. 336pp. $59.95 (cloth).
This volume is a collection of essays on colonial Caribbean society and
economy that seek to demonstrate the complexities in the lives of the
enslaved populations outside of the plantation. The book’s principal
goal is to critique the tradition of Caribbean historiography that views
the plantation complex in a straight-forward monocultural model or
enslaver-enslaved dichotomy. These paradigms, according to the authors,
mask the inherent diversity and heterogeneity of Caribbean society.
Though recognizing the relative dominance of the sugar plantation as a
system of production,
Slavery Without Sugar demonstrates to the contrary that sugar did
not control the whole structure of life in the Caribbean.
The book’s eleven essays include
studies on indigo farming in St. Domingue/Haiti (David Geggus); timber
extraction in Belize (O. Nigel Bolland); livestock farms called "pens"
in Jamaican (B. W. Higman); and coffee farming in Jamaica (two separate
essays, one by S. D. Smith, and the other jointly by Verene A. Shepherd
and Kathleen E. A. Monteith). Other studies examine the production of a
variety of forest, maritime, and other non-sugar agricultural resources,
such as the cultivation of cotton in the Bahamas (Gail Saunders).
A major aspect of the economic
diversity that the volume seeks to illustrate is in the lives of the
enslaved urban populations. Thus Evelyn Powell Jennings’ essay on the
king’s enslaved laborers who worked on Havana’s fortifications in the 18th century demonstrates that
their lives were significant not only in terms of occupational diversity
in enslavement in Cuba but also in illuminating the characteristics of
urban enslavement as a whole. Her essay, along with Pedro L. V. Welch’s
analysis of the urban context of the enslaved in Barbados, Felix V.
Matos Rodriguez’s study of domestics in Puerto Rico, and Franklin W.
Knight’s examination of the free colored in Cuba, demonstrate that
enslaved urban peoples faced conditions of life different from
plantation or rural slavery, thus underscoring the fact that the
peculiar characteristics of urban enslavement have to be studied if the
complexities of Caribbean slavery are to be fully understood. As all the
essays show, the rural dimension represented only one aspect of the
social reality of plantation societies.
Slavery Without Sugar’s
major contribution is in critiquing the totalizing tendency to focus on
sugar; "the concept of a single type of plantation complex modeled on
sugar can no longer be applied sweepingly to the colonial Caribbean" (p.
14). In exploring different dimensions of non-sugar production, the
volume does an effective job in illuminating the complex nature of
Caribbean economy and the implications of those forms of production for
our understanding of the wider dynamics of class, race, and power
outside of the sugar plantation. Labor processes, for instance, affected
settlement patterns, demographic characteristics, and political power.
Thus the socioeconomic marginality of Jamaican pen-keepers, who lacked
political power, is contrasted with the relatively better-situated
status of coffee farmers. Indeed, the conditions of enslaved labor in
the Caribbean varied according to a number of factors not the least of
which were the nature of the economic enterprise in which they were
engaged and whether they were in a rural or urban setting. For
qualitative differences existed in their lives, their contribution to
the economy, their capacity to negotiate the terms of their conditions
of enslavement, and their pursuit of freedom.
In stressing that diversification
was "the real Caribbean experience," the contributors to the volume are
not exactly breaking fresh ground. The theme of diversity in commodity
production and the occupation of the enslaved had been emphasized by
Barry Higman and others since the 1970s.1
However, Slavery Without
Sugar makes a significant contribution to an under-researched aspect
of Caribbean studies, by adding to the pluralist discourse on Caribbean
economic and social history.
1. B.W. Higman, Slave Population and
Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1976) and Slave
Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807– 1834 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1984).
