These books represent very different approaches to the study of the Caribbean. Political scientists Richard Hillman and Thomas D’Agostino approach recent Dominican and Jamaican politics eclectically, combining perspectives from the modernization, dependency, and corporatist schools. Their eclecticism minimizes dogmatism, but it also introduces ambivalence into their account. This is notable, for example, in their treatment of democracy. Drawing on modernization theory, the authors often seem to accept “democracy” at face value as something that exists or is being created in the two societies; less frequently, presumably drawing on dependency and corporatist perspectives, they allude to the democratic façade that masks authoritarianism, personalism, and patron-client relations in Caribbean societies. The authors resolve this ambivalence by designating the two nations as “transitional societies” with mixes of traditional-authoritarian and modern-democratic values and practices.
Hillman and D’Agostino’s ambivalence on such issues as democracy is compounded by their limited historical perspective, which seems confined to an obligatory introductory chapter on “the legacies of the past.” Their real subject, contemporary politics, lacks much sense of historical dynamics and evolution. For example, they cite social science research from the early 1970s as if it captured eternal truths rather than moments in the historical flow. Unfortunately, Distant Neighbors is of little use to the advanced historian.
In contrast to Hillman and D’Agostino’s broad, often abstract approach, Frank Taylor’s To Hell With Paradise is focused, concrete, and interesting to read. Approximately two-thirds of the book treats the foundation of Jamaican tourism from 1891 to 1914; the remainder treats the evolution of the industry up to the 1990s. Taylor sees the Jamaican tourist industry as an outgrowth of the slave plantation society, “the new sugar” (p. 93) derived from “the ratooning of the plantation.” “By 1914,” he writes, “there had emerged in the island of Jamaica (and in some other portions of the Caribbean) a new kind of South Atlantic system, with hotel chains and a fresh form of body traffic for profit” (p. m).
In Taylor’s well-documented view, international tourism was (and is) a form of neocolonialism that heightened Jamaica’s dependence on metropolitan powers, enriched a few (mostly foreign) entrepreneurs, abused most Jamaicans with racism and classism, and alienated prime lands from national control. Taylor’s account should give pause to those who see international tourism as a cure for the Caribbean’s appalling economic problems. For more than one hundred years, elite Jamaicans and foreigners have repeatedly held out the illusory image of the tourist paradise; a cost of the almighty tourist dollar has been popular dignity and well-being.
Comparative studies should be encouraged, but to maximize their potential they need to acquire the historical depth, clarity of perception, and sense of urgency represented in books like To Hell With Paradise.
