This thesis first appeared in mimeographed form in 1946 and has now been published without change, after years without notice. The period 1697-1755 was chosen because its beginning saw the assignment to France of Saint Domingue by the Treaty of Ryswick, which enabled France to displace England and Portugal in dominating the distribution of sugar in Europe; its end marks the onset of the French and Indian War that led to economic collapse after boomtime in the French West Indies. It also includes, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, the time of writing of two of the best sugar planters’ manuals to come from the New World: Labat’s from the Lesser Antilles and Andreoni’s from Brazil. These two works provide much of the information in the two-thirds of the book that describe techniques of producing cane and sugar, which thus turns out to be a comparison of Antillean and Brazilian practices, but is also based on a wide variety of other sources. Much of the remaining third describes trading arrangements, mainly international, in which sugar played a role; it therefore partially reflects the preoccupations of the introduction and short conclusion, whose major concerns, which are stated in general terms, seem to be social and geopolitical, with strong hints of some of the current lamentations of dependency theory. This disparity in contents is useful in reminding us that these latter emphases were (as they remain) popular and even dominant forty years ago, whereas the subject matter of most of the book was not.
My only objection to this work is that the comparative data are not presented in tabular form. Instead, they lie strewn so copiously throughout the “text” as to turn it into a kind of large prototable crying out for recognition of its potential nature, an event that would serve, by the way, to sharpen some of the author’s points (as it would dull others). Aside from this defect of presentation, the work is certainly useful: the observations are clearly stated, the topics inclusive, the bibliography extensive. It was well worthwhile to have made it accessible through publication.
