“This book is mostly a meditation, a personal look back,” Sidney Mintz confesses, “not weighty scholarship” (p. 24). Despite the modest disclaimer, the text sheds light on the characteristics that set the Caribbean apart in world history while also highlighting the diversity within the region. Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico each followed distinctive historical trajectories, Mintz tells us, which intertwined and overlapped economically, socially, and politically.
What distinguished the region, Mintz argues, was the development of large-scale sugar plantations and the use of African slavery to cultivate the crops—what he calls the “plantation complex” (p. 12). This oppressive system encouraged the development of regimented and hierarchical conceptions of race, skin color, and social difference. Plantations and slavery shaped the colonies in ways that would last even after the collapse of these economies.
Mintz combines anthropological and historical methods seamlessly to “make my own sense out of the past” and to...
