Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World.

Paquette, Robert L.

Sugar remains a mysterious and compelling substance. While scientists have developed an entire subfield known as glycobiology to probe sugar's vital role in human cell growth and immunology, social scientists continue to explore sugar's centrality to the making of the modern world. The seemingly insatiable European demand for sweetness bound continents together, populated frontiers, raised sleepy port towns into bustling entrepots, and powered the Atlantic slave trade for four centuries. A clear majority of the millions of enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean on sugar plantations whose size, sophisticated integration of production and processing, and intensive use of the factors of production translated into economic enterprises of the first rank.

Arthur Stinchcombe, a sociologist with a long list of publications in social theory and an open preference for the thinking of Weber and Trotsky, has ventured boldly into the history of the transatlantic world and of capitalist development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He wants to explain the emergence of slave societies in the Caribbean, the variations among them, and their different roads to emancipation. In the process, he reflects on the meaning of freedom, seeing it as a historically conditioned set of shifting possibilities with a "zero-sum aspect" in a system of social relations. (p. 323) Stinchcombe divides his sprawling book into two main parts, twelve chapters, and more than one hundred sub-chapters. It contains "no new facts," as he candidly admits, for he has entered no archives. Nor does it contain any new general theory. Stinchcombe received a Guggenheim fellowship which allowed him to read widely in the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago, and from "browsing" through secondary sources he has produced a rapid stream of generalizations, most of which "have been made before." (p. xi) Stinchcombe justifies this book as a useful synthesis that provides "quite a lot of facts that most sociologists do not know." Throughout he builds analytical framework that "pack[s] description more densely ... to make it more memorable." (p. xiii)

But books tend to be more memorable when they are readable. This one suffers terminally from disorganization, repetitiveness, dense, jargony prose, syntactical sloppiness, excessive and misplaced commas, dozens of proofreading errors, scores of unanchored demonstrative pronouns, and a similar number of one-sentence paragraphs. The result should embarrass Princeton University Press. Not only does one wonder whether the manuscript had a copy editor but whether it underwent outside review, and if so, who are the geniuses who passed favorable judgment. Specialists will have a field day picking apart Stinchcombe's generalizations and exposing his factual errors, big and small. In the preface, for example, Stinchcombe gives as an example of a significant generalization that during Cuba's nineteenth-century sugar boom, "Havana and nearby-provinces had both more slaves and more Spaniards (peninsulares) than the rest of Cuba, while the east had more creoles, more free colored, and fewer slaves." (p. xiv) Elsewhere (p. 150) Stinchcombe says, "In Spanish the comparable word [criollo] implies white race." But in colonial Cuba, criollo meant American born. It was extended to those of darker phenotype and frequently used by people of color as a surname. He also gets wrong the meaning of creole in other places. But even granting Stinchcombe's definition, the generalization proves at best misleading. Nineteenth-century Cuban census data show that more free coloreds lived in Cuba's western department (which included Havana) than in Cuba's eastern department, and since whites in the eastern department numbered only about a quarter of those in the western department, the west probably had more native-born whites as well as peninsulares. The introduction states (p. 12) "that in 1790 there were no substantial [democratic and emancipatory?] movements in any of the [Caribbean] islands in the direction they were all going to go in the 19th century." A footnote adds, "The main exceptions for blacks were maroon societies in mountains and jungles ... a serious but small rebellion against Danes on St. Johns; and blacks' joining Caribs on St. Vincent." Yet in what way do these examples qualify as exceptions? Maroons often held slaves; their societies tended to be hierarchical and restorationist. No "serious but small rebellion" of slaves took place on St. Johns in 1790. Stinchcombe is probably thinking of the 1733 revolt which almost captured the island. But why is this revolt singled out and not a host of others that occurred in the eighteenth century?

Too often Stinchcombe's arguments bend into circularity. After providing a definition of "slave society" that mischaracterizes the position of Moses Finley, Stinchcombe alludes (p. 8) to "great variations among the islands in the forces producing slave societies (sugar plantations and local political autonomy)." The very next sentence says: "These forces, varying among the empires, produced political autonomy differently on different islands." He acknowledges that slave societies were embedded in "a larger empire's political system" (p. 8) but shortly thereafter, without clarification, speaks of an "autonomous slave society." For all his reading in secondary sources, Stinchcombe ignores the monumental work of such economic historians as Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, and David Eltis that might have caused him at least to rethink some of his points about political economy and slave demography. A more serious inconsistency stems from Stinchcombe's professed understanding of the meaning of freedom as a social relation. Although at times Stinchcombe recognizes that slaves never approached the Platonic ideal as mere extensions of their masters' will, that the rights denied slaves by law often were granted them by custom through struggle, his mechanical discussion of the growth of slave societies leaves little room for the behavior of slaves and the ideas that motivated them (or their masters for that matter). While at one level Stinchcombe is correct to locate outside of the sugar islands the decisive forces that destroyed slavery as a social system, the discrete "paths to emancipation" cannot be understood apart from the initiatives of the slaves themselves, as the events of 1848 in Martinique and the Danish Virgin Islands or those of the 1880s in Cuba and Brazil amply attest.

Stinchcombe concludes, (p. 331) "If anyone offers you a job on a sugar plantation, do not take it." Here is more advice. If anyone offers you this book, do not take it.

Robert L. Paquette Hamilton College