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The Caribbean Sugar Industry and Slavery

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THE CARIBBEAN SUGAR INDUSTRIES: CONSTRAINTS AND OPPORTUNITIES. By HAGELBERGG. B. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Antilles Research Program Occasional Papers No. 3. Pp. 174.)
BLACKS IN COLONIAL CUBA 1774-1899. By KIPLEKENNETH F. (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1976. Pp. 115.)
EL INGENIO: COMPLEJO ECONÓMICO SOCIAL CUBANO DEL AZÚCAR. By FRAGINALSMANUEL MORENO. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978. 3 volumes.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Franklin W. Knight
Franklin W. Knight*
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
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Type
Review Essays
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , 1983 , pp. 219 - 229
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Hagelberg's work seems to have elicited very little response, to date. For my review of Kiple, see Hispanic American Historical Review 56, no. 4 (Nov. 1976):647-48. See also Fé Iglesias Garcia, “Características de la población cubana en 1862,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (3rd series) 22 (Sept.-Dec. 1980):89-110, and “El censo cubano de 1877 y sus diferentes versiones,” Santiago 34 (June 1979):167-214. The most sophisticated evaluation of the Moreno Fraginals hypothesis can be found in Rebecca J. Scott, “Slave Emancipation and the Transition to Free Labor in Cuba, 1868-1895,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1982.

2. George Beckford, Persistent Poverty. Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

3. George Beckford, Persistent Poverty; also, George Beckford et al., “Sugar and Change in the Caribbean,” New World Quarterly 5, nos. 1-2 (1969):32-49. Havelock Brewster, Jamaica's Life or Death: The Sugar Industry (Kingston: New World Group pamphlet no. 4, 1967).

4. Furfural is an intermediate organic chemical, C5H4O2, used in the manufacture of plastics and in refining lubricating oils.

5. Mordecai Commission Report (1966), pp. 69-70, cited in Hagelberg, Caribbean Sugar Industry, p. 10.

6. Some of the problems of evaluating the data provided by the sugar industry may also be found in Fé Iglesias Garcia, “La formación del capitalismo en la producción de azúcar en Cuba, 1860-1900,” unpublished paper, 1981. See also Fé Iglesias, “Algunos aspectos de la distribución de la tierra en 1899,” Santiago 40 (Dec. 1980):119-78.

7. See Carmelo Mesa Lago, Cuba in the 1970s (Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1974).

8. See Caribbean Contact, July 1982, p. 11, cols. 4-5 (St. Vincent).

9. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade, A Census (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

10. Kiple's selections are somewhat arbitrary, and he does not include the notable work of Vicente Vásquez Queipo, Informe fiscal sobre fomento de la población blanca en la isla de Cuba (Madrid: Alegría, 1845).

11. One has only to recall the number of cities and groups contesting the result of the expensive and elaborate 1980 census returns in the United States to realize that correctly enumerating any population is a difficult task.

12. The importance of race and color is dealt with by Verena Martínez Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974). See also Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), and Fredrika Bremer, The Homes of the New World: Impressions of America, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1853; new edition, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1968).

13. In 1981 Moreno Fraginals won the Clarence Haring Prize that the American Historical Association awards to “that Latin American who has published the most outstanding book in Latin American history during the preceding five years.” The influence of Moreno Fraginals emerges not only in the work of social science scholars such as Miguel Barnet, Fé Iglesias Garcia, Rebecca Scott, and myself, but also in a number of Cuban cinematographic and other artistic presentations such as the films El rancheador

(1977) and El otro francisco (1975) directed by Sergio Giral, La última cena (1976) directed by Tomas Guitiérrez Alea, and the pantomime Cimarrón produced by Olga Flora and Ramon.

14. It was translated by Cedric Belfrage and published by Monthly Review Press, New York and London, in 1976 under the title The Sugarmill: The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760-1860.

15. Noël Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1949-50).

16. Elsa Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). Goveia demonstrated that slavery could only be properly understood in its broader social and economic context.

17. For the decline of the sugar industry, see the following: Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1753-1833 (New York: American Historical Association, 1928; new edition, New York: Octagon Books, 1969). Barry Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807-1834 (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1976). Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment 1830-1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Alan Adamson, Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). Donald Wood, Trinidad in Transition: The Years after Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). Bridget Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad 1870-1900 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

18. This and subsequent translations are mine.

19. J. H. Parry and P. M. Sherlock, A Short History of the West Indies (3rd edition, New York: St. Martins Press, 1971), pp. 63-80. Franklin W. Knight, The Caribbean. The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 87-92. Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492-1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 111-55.

20. T. O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1973). D. B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). David Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).

21. A legua is a nautical calculation, equivalent to approximately 3 miles. A caballería is a land measurement of 33.3 acres. A trapiche is a single-roller expressive mill.

22. The author gives slightly different figures in Volume 1, p. 68 and p. 171.

23. Note his article, “El esclavo y la mechanización de los ingenios,” Bohemia, 13 June 1969, pp. 98-99, and “Plantations in the Caribbean: The Case of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo,” unpublished paper, International Conference on the Transition from Slavery to Free Labor in the Hispanic Caribbean, 11-13 June 1981, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

24. Rebecca Scott, “The Transition from Slavery to Wage Labor in Cuba, 1860-1886,” International Conference on the Transition from Slavery to Free Labor, 11-13 June 1981, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic.

25. Scott, “Slave Emancipation,” p. 33 (emphasis in the original).

26. Iglesias Garcia, “La formacion del capitalismo,” unnumbered pages.