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Small Islands and Huge Comparisons: Caribbean Plantations, Historical Unevenness, and Capitalist Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Dale Tomich
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Extract

Charles Tilly (1984) has advocated the study of “big structures, large processes and huge comparisons” as the surest path to knowledge in the present conjuncture. This essay follows his lead with a comparative study of the transformation of the sugar industry in Martinique and Cuba during the nineteenth century. Slavery in the Americas is commonly viewed as an archaic form of social and economic organization that is incompatible with modern forms of economy and polity emerging in the nineteenth century. Such a perspective presumes the singularity of slavery and represents its abolition throughout the hemisphere as a linear transition to capitalist modernity.

Type
Articles
Information
Social Science History , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , Fall 1994 , pp. 339 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © Social Science History Association 1994 

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