In this handsome, sturdy edition, Anne Pérotin-Dumon impressively covers the literature in English, French, and Spanish and asks us to reconsider the applicability of the “plantation model”—which stresses the pivotal role of the colonial sugarcane complex in structuring life and land—to the complexities of Antillean life. True, “plantation society,” as a socioeconomic structure based on enslaved Africans, Europeans owners, and large-scale production of cotton or sugar, flourished from Brazil to the southern United States. Yet even so, in more than one region, and perhaps especially in the Lesser Antilles and Guadeloupe, creolization and mestization began early on to blur the African-European dichotomy, and the development of ports from simple shipping wharfs to coastal cities shifted the focus from sugar plantation to city and, eventually, from the insular Caribbean to the Atlantic world.
Between the introduction and the closing epilogue, Pérotin-Dumon covers in a most detailed fashion the trajectory of Guadeloupe’s...