Dear CARIBBEAN-STUDIES Subscribers,
We would like to announce a new publication from University of Pennsylvania Press, which we hope will be of interest.
[CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 75]The Plantation Machine
Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint-Domingue and British Jamaica
Trevor Burnard & John Garrigus
http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/the-plantation-machine
"[The Plantation Machine is] an exciting intellectual history of the place and agency of the plantation system in the making of eighteenth-century Atlantic capitalism. In their analysis of the two largest and most profitable sugar colonies in the Caribbean from 1740 to 1788, a crucial several decades in that region's history, these two scholars ask us to forget what we already knew upon opening their book, as they present us with fresh insights on two paralleled pasts."—American Historical Review
Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were especially brutal but conspicuously successful eighteenth-century slave societies and imperial colonies. These plantation regimes were, to adopt a metaphor of the era, complex "machines," finely tuned over time by planters, merchants, and officials to become more efficient at exploiting their enslaved workers and serving their empires. Using a wide range of archival evidence, The Plantation Machine traces a critical half-century in the development of the social, economic, and political frameworks that made these societies possible. Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus find deep and unexpected similarities in these two prize colonies of empires that fought each other throughout the period. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue experienced, at nearly the same moment, a bitter feud between planters and governors, a violent conflict between masters and enslaved workers, a fateful tightening of racial laws, a steady expansion of the slave trade, and metropolitan criticism of planters' cruelty.
The core of The Plantation Machine addresses the Seven Years' War and its aftermath. The events of that period, notably a slave poisoning scare in Saint-Domingue and a near-simultaneous slave revolt in Jamaica, cemented white dominance in both colonies. Burnard and Garrigus argue that local political concerns, not emerging racial ideologies, explain the rise of distinctive forms of racism in these two societies. The American Revolution provided another imperial crisis for the beneficiaries of the plantation machine, but by the 1780s whites in each place were prospering as never before—and blacks were suffering in new and disturbing ways. The result was that Jamaica and Saint-Domingue became vitally important parts of the late eighteenth-century American empires of Britain and France.
Trevor Burnard is professor in and head of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World.
John Garrigus is Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington and author of Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue.
With all best wishes,
Combined Academic Publishers
University of Pennsylvania Press, | The Early Modern Americas | August 2018 | 360pp | 9780812224238 | PB | £20.99*
*Price subject to change.
########################################################################
To unsubscribe from the CARIBBEAN-STUDIES list, click the following link:
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CARIBBEAN-STUDIES&A=1
|