The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex : Essays in Atlantic History (Studies in Comparative World History)

Rating:
Summary: Illuminating dissection of the embryonic "global economy."
Review: Despite being laced with annoying typos (this is from Cambridge Univ. Press?), I found the substance of the book to be most informative. The slave-labor sugar/cotton/tobacco plantation is a familar feature of early modern history, and is usually encountered in regional histories of, say, the Caribbean, or Brazil, or the United States. But this book traces the "plantation complex" from its beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean, on Cyprus, through its spread across the Atlantic, and its final last gasps in this century. People who are used to thinking of "slave plantations" exclusively in the context of the United States will be disappointed. For reasons explained by the author, his primary focus is on the sugar plantations of the New World--these tended to be purer examples of the phenomenon. He also spends a good deal of time analyzing the impact on African societies and economies; material which I found especially instructive. The account of the stepwise demise of slavery in Brazil was also very enlightening, especially how emancipation became an economic opportunity for entire classes of slaveholding plantation owners in the 1870's, similar to "mass layoffs" today. I think this book is crucial to understanding where the "New World" stands today--racially, economically and socially. You just have to ignore the typos.