This disappointing book, with its deceptive title, deals with the details of slavery only peripherally. The author’s statement that the book covers a period “from about 1750 to about 1900” hardly sets chronological limits that conform to what most historians consider to be the Age of Enlightenment. Furthermore, while the work focuses on the Caribbean, it hardly enlightens us on what is conventionally regarded as the political economy of the region. In addition, it succeeds as neither good sociology nor instructive history. Finally, it is often clumsily written, replete with fallacious statements or questionable assertions, and has a bibliography that curiously omits some of the best works on the Caribbean.
Sugar Island Slavery is divided into two parts. Part I contains six chapters that look at geography; variations between sugar and nonsugar islands; differences in the imperial governments; the political control exercised by the planter groups on the sugar islands; and the way in which racial categories distinguished between free coloreds, slaves, and blacks. Apart from some egregious errors with regard to the geographical size of particular islands—for example, none of the islands included in the medium range are more than forty miles wide—there are some questionable assertions about social segmentation in the islands. For example, that author claims that, “Where the sugar frontier never really arrived before emancipation, as in Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, or Curaçao, the result then was a small population overall with large free colored ratio to both the slave and the white population, and very little distinction by race in the stratification system” (p. 12, emphasis added). Also questionable is the assertion that “before sugar . . . the proportion free colored [sic] grew fairly rapidly, and free colored were not bounded in marriage or in occupation from free whites, and had essentially the same legal, social, and political status as poor free whites” (p. 159, emphasis added). The discussion on a “slave-master agency tie,” presented between pages 143 and 158 assumes that only white people could own slaves.
Part II reviews the various processes of emancipation and the development of a plethora of political forms subsequent to the abolition of the slave systems. It also attempts to explore themes, previously examined by others such as Moses Finley and Orlando Patterson, dealing with the sociology of freedom. Unfortunately this section offers no better exposition of the subject than the previous one. It is hard to accept the French Revolution as a “democratizing force” in the Caribbean, and comparisons between European colonial administrations during the period of slavery and forms of governments such as the caudillo types in nineteenth-century South America and the Dominican Republic resemble an ill-fitting comparison of apples and pineapples. Again, some assertions are strikingly novel: that cotton cultivation was similar to sugar cultivation (p. 217); that St. Lucia was conquered without difficulty during the Napoleonic Wars (p. 217); that Haiti went “out of the sugar business and into the coffee business” (p. 254); and that Jamaica has “essentially ethnically homogenous upper classes” (p. 283).
No bibliography can, of course, be complete. But as one struggles through this convoluted discussion on the Caribbean, one wonders on what basis the writer made his selection of reliable sources. A bibliography on Caribbean societies that does not include Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro García on Cuba; or Patrick Bryan, Kathleen Mary Butler, Philip Curtin, Gad Heuman, Kamau Brathwaite, and Swithin Wilmot on Jamaica; or Frank Moya Pons and Roberto Cassá on the Dominican Republic; or Francisco Scarano and Teresita Martínez Vergne on Puerto Rico certainly does not inspire confidence in the generalizations of the author.
