Title:
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History
Author:
Philip D. Curtin
Year of Publication:
1990
Thesis:
Plantation complex drives the slave trade, preindustrial global population movements, exchange of goods (ergo, it affects areas that don't have plantations). This synthetic collection of essays/lectures displaces the U.S. South and focus on plantation development beginning from from medieval times in the Mediterranean (1123) and ending in the 19th century with democracies and revolutions and shifts to other forms of labor. Focuses on sugar production, and therefore is centered in West Africa, Caribbean, and Brazil.
Time:
15-19th centuries
Geography:
British, French, Portuguese Atlantic / Africa / Caribbean / Brazil
Organization:
Preface
Preface to the first edition
1. The Mediterranean origins
Sugar planting
Cyprus
The Mediterranean slave trade
The mature plantation complex
Forms of cultural encounter
2. Sugar planting from Cyprus to the Atlantic Islands
The Atlantic Islands
Colonial institutions: The Canaries
The westward migration
To the Americas
Why migration?
3. Africa and the slave trade
African isolation
Political forms south of the Sahara
The trans-Sahara trade
Disease and isolation
African, Muslim, and European slavery
The beginning of the Atlantic trade
4. Capitalism, feudalism, and sugar planting in Brazil
Feudalism and capitalism
Intentions and experiments in Brazil
The sugar industry
Feudalism from below
Local government
5. Bureaucrats and free lances in Spanish America
Frontiers: freedom and anarchy versus despotism and slavery
The crown and the bureaucracy
Intentions and achievements in the American world
The West Indies
Mexico
Encomienda
The return of the bureaucrats
Seventeenth-century transition
6. The sugar revolution and the settlement of the Caribbean
Caribbean geography
European settlement
The economics of sugar and disease
The sugar revolution
7. Anarchy and imperial control
"No peace beyond the lines"
Buccaneers and transfrontiersmen
8. Slave soceities on the periphery
Differential population growth
Placer gold
Bandeirantes
Slave revolts and maroon settlements
The settlement colonies
Apogee and revolution
9. The slave trade and the West African economy in the eighteenth century
Prices
The economics of supply
Political enslavement
Rising demand -- rising exports
Assessing the damage
10. Atlantic commerce in the eighteenth century
Bureaucrats and private traders
Commodities in the African trade
The conduct of the African trade
Merchants and planters
Caribbean trade
11. The Democratic Revolution in the Atlantic basin
The Democratic Revolution
Industrialism, capitalism, and imperialism
Background: economic, social, and political
The Englightenment
Realignments in the colonial world
Democratic revolutions and the plantations complex
Counterrevolution in Spanish America
12. Revolution in the French Antilles
Geography of the French Antilles
Social structure and social tensions
The revolution on Saint Domingue
Other islands, other combinations
Aftermath
Reajustments in the nineteenth century
The end of the slave trade
New migrations: new wine in old bottles
The end of slavery in the French and British Caribbean
New plantations: old wine in new bottles
African adjustments
The politics and economics of legitimate trade
14. Teh end fo slavery in the Americas
Brazil: sugar and coffee
Brazil: differential regional growth
Sugar in cuba
Emancipation in cuba
Retrospect
Appendix
Index
Type:
Methods:
chronological
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Quotes:
Notes: