Sugar, Slavery, and Society

This collection of eight essays offers a variety of approaches to the study of societies involved in sugar production around the world from the seventeenth century to the present. They are united by their attention to the class dynamics embedded in sugar production over time. The essays fall roughly into four categories. Two essays on the literature of sugar plantation societies in the Caribbean and Mascarenes, one by Sada Niang and the other by Joyce Leung, trace a historical shift from the representation of sugarcane workers as mere instruments of production to their more recent representation as self-possessed human beings. Unfortunately, both of these essays suffer from opaque rhetoric and jargon, which is especially misplaced in a volume that aims to reach across disciplinary boundaries.Two essays by Bernard Moitt (one coauthored with Horace L. Henriques) reveal that enslaved people in the French Caribbean and the region that became British Guiana engaged in marronage and other forms of overt resistance against a white planter class whose control over their lives was not absolute. This eminently reasonable argument is clouded by Moitt and Henriques’s odd decision to frame their analysis in terms of a debate over whether the sugar plantation was a “total institution,” a heuristic device with no explanatory power. Another pair of essays, one by Anton L. Allahar on the politics of Cuban annexation in the mid – nineteenth century and the other by Richard Follett and Rick Halpern on the class struggle between freedpeople and sugar planters in Louisiana following the Civil War, analyze the political economy of sugar. Both show that conflicts over the control of sugar plantation labor had international dimensions. While some Cuban sugar planters looked to the United States to defend slavery in the 1840s and 1850s, some Louisiana planters later in the century hoped that Chinese and Italian immigrants would provide an alternative to African American workers.Two more essays explore the structure of sugar production in a modern context. Paget Henry’s essay argues that the sugar plantation complex bequeathed a bitter legacy of planter hegemony, racism, and crisis-ridden development to the Caribbean region. As a counterpoint to the rest of the volume, B. S. Baviskar observes that India’s commercial sugar industry is not dominated by large planters but, rather, is primarily in the hands of small farmers who have established cooperatives to process their sugar. Baviskar’s essay should remind scholars that sugar itself has not predetermined the social relations that have arisen over time from its production.Taken as a whole, the volume is wide ranging, and the essays cover a good deal of space and time, but its historical imagination has limits. For instance, none of the essays is explicitly comparative, and except for the essay on India, the volume elides differences among the various sugar plantation societies discussed in the book. Moreover, all the essays are concerned with the political and social relations of sugar production, and none (except for Baviskar’s in a limited way) with its circulation or consumption as a commodity. In this respect, the volume, which originated in a 1989 conference, is already showing its age

Art · Literature · Political science · Politics · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Ruling class · Social science · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · History · Law · Philosophy