The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard

      A Comparative History of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue

      This book is about social, political, and economic transformations in eighteenth-century Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, two extremely profitable but socially monstrous slave societies. These islands, we argue, were more than minor colonies in distant parts of the world, far removed from European consciousness and without global importance. Rather, they were Europe’s most successful plantation societies, and we examine them during the years when they were at their absolute peak, between 1740 and 1788. This study therefore chronicles the two most important (and not coincidentally the two most brutal) slave societies within the plantation complex that shaped the Atlantic World from its fourteenth-century origins to the end of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s.

      That plantation complex depended on a vibrant Atlantic slave trade, supplying large numbers of Africans to the tropical regions of the Americas, where they were coerced into producing luxury commodities originally developed in Asia for a European market. In the years between 1740 and 1788, this plantation complex—which we prefer to call the plantation machine, adopting the mechanistic metaphor common in the age—had reached an apogee of sorts in the Greater Antilles. In other words, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue came close to perfecting a form of economic organization that operated on a global scale, using specialized laborers from one continent who did not merely farm but in fact manufactured products in a second continental zone for consumers in a third. This revolutionary form of social and economic organization bears careful study, not only for how it functioned but for the social and political mechanisms that sustained it. This work provides that close-grained, empirically based investigation of the plantation machine within the social and political contexts of Saint-Domingue and Jamaica between 1748 and 1788.

      We take as our starting point that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the plantation machine was the main driving force shaping most aspects of European colonization in the Atlantic World. Plantation colonies were peculiar and distinctive in that they were not based on community production opening up opportunities for trade. Rather their plantations were specialized producers that relied on exchange systems developed elsewhere, in Europe and especially in Africa. The plantation machine was quintessentially colonial, barely using local resources while depending heavily on goods from elsewhere—capital from Europe and labor from Africa. The colonies that perfected it, as did Jamaica and Saint-Domingue by the 1780s, exemplify a particular kind of colonialism that proved influential not just in the Americas but in European empires generally. Thus, this book is not just a local study of two interesting but unusual colonies on the margins of the Atlantic World. That might appear to be the case when we think of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue’s later history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when they were shriveled—if somewhat more egalitarian—versions of their former selves. Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were much more important in the eighteenth century than their later global insignificance might suggest.¹

      The Caribbean was the world region that exemplified more than any other the complex forces of early modern imperialism, forces that helped make colonialism a truly global phenomenon. The Caribbean was the first area in the New World to experience European imperialism and was battered by those forces for longer than anywhere else. Starting around 1500, Europeans largely eliminated the Amerindian population; they converted tropical hardwood forests into grazing and farmland; and they imposed a nightmarish system of slave labor to work this new land. These events, especially the nature of the sugar plantation system, left the West Indies as a diminished and regressive world.² But this book draws attention to another aspect of Caribbean history that at first glance seems