Fri Nov 10 06:37:17 EST 2006
Published by EH.NET (November 2006)
Russell R. Menard, _Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and
Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados_. Charlottesville, VA:
University of Virginia Press, 2006. xiv + 181 pp. $39.50 (cloth),
ISBN: 0-8139-2540-1.
Reviewed for EH.NET by David Eltis, Department of History, Emory University.
A number of benchmark issues in the history of slavery in the
Atlantic World attract the more or less continuous attention of
scholars and provide a quick way of assessing shifts in the
interpretative eddies of the larger historiography. The relationship
between slavery and economic efficiency is one, the racial
exclusiveness of chattel slavery in the Americas is another, and the
origin of sugar cultivation in the Caribbean is a third. This short
book, while certainly concerned with the single island of Barbados,
is about all three of these broad issues. Brazil, of course, had sent
slave-grown sugar to Europe for the better part of a century before
the sugar complex reached the eastern Caribbean, but the Portuguese
system could at first not keep pace with the new sugar areas. In
other words, plantation slavery was scarcely novel in the 1640s, but
its North American variant apparently differed from what had gone
before, at least initially.
A new monograph on early Barbados has appeared every decade or so
since the 1960s as though to punctuate the ongoing discussions of
these issues in the periodical literature. _Sweet Negotiations_ is
the shortest of the series, but also the best to date. In the first
three chapters Menard tracks the origins of the Caribbean sugar
complex via a careful exploration of Barbados' Recopied Deed Books
which allow him to show the emergence of large estates as well as
throw light on the switch to slave labor (because estates were often
sold together with servants and livestock). He argues against the
idea of a "sugar revolution" because plantation agriculture and
slavery were well established on the island of Barbados before sugar
became the dominant crop. Tobacco and cotton had already generated
the basic elements of a plantation complex, and had cleared the way
(literally given the dense indigenous flora of the island) for sugar
cane's subsequent takeover. Large numbers of slaves were already
arriving on the island to work on tobacco and cotton in the early
1640s. Far from sugar saving the island from impoverishment, the
prosperity generated by these earlier staples made it possible for
planters to embrace sugar more quickly. Thus, Menard prefers the term
"sugar boom" to "sugar revolution." The deed books also allow Menard
to argue that the capital to finance the boom was English, not Dutch.
There is no evidence of Dutch involvement with plantations, but
abundant signs of links with London families and capital. This nicely
complements the finding of Wim Klooster (_Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade
in the Caribbean, 1648-1795_ (Leiden, 1998)) that Dutch merchants in
the Caribbean advanced a lot of credit to French planters and very
little to the English.
Menard then describes technological change, broadly defined, in the
century or so after the establishment of sugar in a single chapter.
There was no such thing as decline in Barbados because planters
maintained their innovative approach and produced better sugar and
sugar by-products in response to competition and changes in European
markets. In a penultimate chapter Menard returns to the question of
what was new about the system. He singles out four institutions as
accounting for the sugar complex following a different path in
Barbados (and by implication the Caribbean). These are first, the
integrated plantation -- or the concentration of the growing and the
processing of the cane in the hands of one owner; second, the
gang-labor system; third, the provision ground system; and fourth,
the commission system which allowed planters to sell their own sugar
in Europe. In a final chapter Menard examines the links between
Barbados and the wider world, and argues that what happened on the
island had a large impact on the Americas as a whole. In effect, the
system that developed in Barbados, including an "ideology of
whiteness," spread because Barbados became a "cultural hearth" for
the English Americas. Throughout, Menard's arguments are rooted in
careful scholarship, much of it necessarily quantitative, but the
discussion is lively, and historical actors are constantly given
their voice. In short, it is a very good read.
Which is not to say that all Menard's positions are completely
defensible. The origins of the gang-labor system and the provision
ground system (two of the four features that made Barbados different
according to the author) are obscure and, as Menard himself concedes,
are perhaps eighteenth rather than seventeenth century innovations.
Also the attack on the idea of a sugar revolution seems unnecessary
in that its advocates would have no difficulty in incorporating
Menard's new evidence into their position. Finally, Menard's argument
on the existence of large cotton and tobacco plantations prior to
sugar's appearance is somewhat stronger than the argument that
extensive slavery predated sugar's arrival. Indeed, his discussion of
the size of the very early slave population might mislead readers
into thinking that evidence of the early slave trade is stronger than
it really is. Attempts to compensate for lack of documentation about
immigration tend to use demographic data to derive estimates of
arrivals, but for Barbados such an approach founders on the fact that
population counts and information on vital rates scarcely exist
before the 1670s. But these are minor problems in what is a
first-rate scholarly work.
David Eltis is Professor of History, Emory University, and is author
of _The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas_ (Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
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