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The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures
Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations
As a young anthropologist, Sidney W. Mintz undertook fieldwork in Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico. Fifty years later, the eminent scholar of the Caribbean returns to those experiences to meditate on the societies and on the island people who befriended him. These reflections illuminate continuities and differences between these cultures, but even more they exemplify the power of people to reveal their own history.
Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico—a dynamic past born of a confluence of peoples of a sort that has happened only a few times in human history—with the ways that he heard people speak about themselves and their lives. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be.
This book is both a summation of Mintz’s groundbreaking work in the region and a reminder of how anthropology allows people to explore the deep truths that history may leave unexamined.
Mintz seeks to conjoin his knowledge of the history of Jamaica, Haiti, and Puerto Rico—a dynamic past born of a confluence of peoples of a sort that has happened only a few times in human history—with the ways that he heard people speak about themselves and their lives. Mintz argues that in Jamaica and Haiti, creolization represented a tremendous creative act by enslaved peoples: that creolization was not a passive mixing of cultures, but an effort to create new hybrid institutions and cultural meanings to replace those that had been demolished by enslavement. Globalization is not the new phenomenon we take it to be.
This book is both a summation of Mintz’s groundbreaking work in the region and a reminder of how anthropology allows people to explore the deep truths that history may leave unexamined.
- GenresHistoryAnthropology
272 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2010
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October 20, 2014
Although sugar and slavery were important historical factors for each of the three Caribbean colonies examined here, the colonies themselves differed and continue to differ in significant and surprising ways.
I had read Sweetness and Power many years ago, yet I still held in my mind a uniform culture complex for the entire Caribbean region. I could have not been more wrong. These three ancient colonies, of which Puerto Rico is still a colony of sorts, were in the early colonial era all Spanish. But in the 17th century, Jamaica became (through force) English and Saint Domingue (Haiti) was taken by the French. Jamaica imported a colossal number of slaves and maintained a strict caste-like system with African slaves (and their descendants) at the bottom, white settlers at the top, and a small band of freed people of mixed race forming a kind of servant class. After slavery, churches gathered many of the freed men and women into village peasantries.
France also imported a huge number of slaves, but did not copy Jamaica's model of domination. In Haiti, freed slaves and their descendants were afforded considerable protection from the Code Noir of Louis XIV. This legal protection allowed blacks to own property (including slaves) and allowed whites to claim their creole children as legitimate heirs. As a result, whites were often highly protective of their racial identity, reacting with extreme prejudice against the creoles even if the creoles as a group were afforded something close to French citizenship.
For both the British in Jamaica and the French in Haiti, the sugar plantations represented some of the most profitable colonial ventures in the history of the world. This abruptly changed with revolution in Haiti in the late 18th century and with emancipation in Jamaica a bit later. As Mintz shows, the Haitians lagged behind the Americans, even though the USA and Haiti became post-colonies at roughly the same time. The Haitians had freed themselves, but no nation wanted to recognize them, and precious few political, social, or economic institutions had developed in the slavery years which would make the transition out of slavery easier. The US feared the slave revolt model spreading into America, and France wanted its sugar back and even tried under Napoleon to find a way to bring slavery back to Haiti.
Although Jamaica and Haiti each developed into distinct societies with their own institutions, Puerto Rico is entirely of a different ilk. In Puerto Rico, there was very little slavery and so a more homogenized, less racially focused culture developed. While Jamaica and Haiti were essential to their colonial masters, Puerto Rico was a bit of an afterthought for the Spanish, and remains so for the Americans who rule it today. The Spanish had both eyes fixed on the mines of Mexico, Peru, and their other mainland holdings. So what developed there was a culture more steeped in Latin machismo than one based on castes with a racist history. There are notions of color in Puerto Rico which can not be considered enlightened, but they do not form an unwritten constitution as in Jamaica or Haiti.
The final chapter looks at creolization. Mintz moves beyond creolization as just another form of the mixing metaphor. In brief, creolization happened in slavery contexts, contexts which are unpacked masterfully in Mintz's sympathetic and perspicacious overview of the unbelievably ugly and often lethal process of becoming a slave. Here, creolization is indexed in the loss of one's own language (and the institutions and practices this language makes possible), and so applies to the northern European colonies but not the Hispanic ones. In Puerto Rico, there were no generations where people had lost all social and cognitive contact with their past.
The ethnographic chapters are divided into two parts: one part history, one part derived from anecdotes of 50+ years of fieldwork. The fieldwork parts tend to emphasize gender based roles and expectations, while the historical parts look primarily at race relations on these islands.
I found this book accessible and enlightening. The only part that was hard to slough through was the first lecture, which looked fairly closely at the heritage of W E B DuBois, in whose honor these lectures were given. The first chapter also gave a high level overview, which again is not as illuminating as the differences which unfolded between these very interesting societies.
I had read Sweetness and Power many years ago, yet I still held in my mind a uniform culture complex for the entire Caribbean region. I could have not been more wrong. These three ancient colonies, of which Puerto Rico is still a colony of sorts, were in the early colonial era all Spanish. But in the 17th century, Jamaica became (through force) English and Saint Domingue (Haiti) was taken by the French. Jamaica imported a colossal number of slaves and maintained a strict caste-like system with African slaves (and their descendants) at the bottom, white settlers at the top, and a small band of freed people of mixed race forming a kind of servant class. After slavery, churches gathered many of the freed men and women into village peasantries.
France also imported a huge number of slaves, but did not copy Jamaica's model of domination. In Haiti, freed slaves and their descendants were afforded considerable protection from the Code Noir of Louis XIV. This legal protection allowed blacks to own property (including slaves) and allowed whites to claim their creole children as legitimate heirs. As a result, whites were often highly protective of their racial identity, reacting with extreme prejudice against the creoles even if the creoles as a group were afforded something close to French citizenship.
For both the British in Jamaica and the French in Haiti, the sugar plantations represented some of the most profitable colonial ventures in the history of the world. This abruptly changed with revolution in Haiti in the late 18th century and with emancipation in Jamaica a bit later. As Mintz shows, the Haitians lagged behind the Americans, even though the USA and Haiti became post-colonies at roughly the same time. The Haitians had freed themselves, but no nation wanted to recognize them, and precious few political, social, or economic institutions had developed in the slavery years which would make the transition out of slavery easier. The US feared the slave revolt model spreading into America, and France wanted its sugar back and even tried under Napoleon to find a way to bring slavery back to Haiti.
Although Jamaica and Haiti each developed into distinct societies with their own institutions, Puerto Rico is entirely of a different ilk. In Puerto Rico, there was very little slavery and so a more homogenized, less racially focused culture developed. While Jamaica and Haiti were essential to their colonial masters, Puerto Rico was a bit of an afterthought for the Spanish, and remains so for the Americans who rule it today. The Spanish had both eyes fixed on the mines of Mexico, Peru, and their other mainland holdings. So what developed there was a culture more steeped in Latin machismo than one based on castes with a racist history. There are notions of color in Puerto Rico which can not be considered enlightened, but they do not form an unwritten constitution as in Jamaica or Haiti.
The final chapter looks at creolization. Mintz moves beyond creolization as just another form of the mixing metaphor. In brief, creolization happened in slavery contexts, contexts which are unpacked masterfully in Mintz's sympathetic and perspicacious overview of the unbelievably ugly and often lethal process of becoming a slave. Here, creolization is indexed in the loss of one's own language (and the institutions and practices this language makes possible), and so applies to the northern European colonies but not the Hispanic ones. In Puerto Rico, there were no generations where people had lost all social and cognitive contact with their past.
The ethnographic chapters are divided into two parts: one part history, one part derived from anecdotes of 50+ years of fieldwork. The fieldwork parts tend to emphasize gender based roles and expectations, while the historical parts look primarily at race relations on these islands.
I found this book accessible and enlightening. The only part that was hard to slough through was the first lecture, which looked fairly closely at the heritage of W E B DuBois, in whose honor these lectures were given. The first chapter also gave a high level overview, which again is not as illuminating as the differences which unfolded between these very interesting societies.
March 2, 2024
“Slavery, Plantations, and Sugar”
A sweet-tooth may damage your teeth, cause diabetes and be a boon to your local dentist, but that’s nothing compared to the human disaster created between 1500 and 1880 when Europeans decided that the West Indies and Brazil were ideal places to grow sugar and import it to their own continent. This offering from a respected professor at Johns Hopkins falls between history and anthropology, not so much of a standard straight-out history as a late career musing (he was 88) on three different islands in the West Indies and their relationship to the plantation system. If Jamaica, Haiti and Puerto Rico still have not become prosperous, middle-class societies, the long-lasting plantation system which smothered all other avenues to development, education, and innovation, may have had something to do with that. Mintz, over a long career, had personal experience in the islands, working with people of different statuses in society.
Mintz states that the welding of field to factory involved in sugar production, in which people had to work efficiently for long hours because the end result was time-sensitive was something that had never existed in Europe before 1500. All the best land was usurped by the plantations. The non-plantation areas, beyond the pale, harbored the poor, the runaways, the vagabonds, and fishermen. But let’s not think of New England or French Canada. The plantations were not small replicas of European society, they were frontier institutions based on violence. Sugar production was brutal and since the Indians died out or were killed and white workers did not want to do the work, slaves proved the answer. Human life was cheap; slaves had no connection to education or health. Force and unrelenting policing outbalanced rule of law. Even if you later abolish slavery, the ability to change direction drastically is dubious since you lack trained personnel and the economic system may not change so quickly.
His discussion of Jamaica struck me as closer to his personal experience. Though in a former Caribbean slave society, a discussion of race is inevitable, I don’t think noting that race and class are closely linked is an eye-opener. When slavery ended in Jamaica, the freed slaves strove to acquire land, as they did in many other parts of the New World, but the rulers of the island, again as elsewhere, paid little attention to their needs or wants. The poor wound up selling their labor for very little. The descendants of slaves struggled to establish decent lives. If their success was not untarnished, still Mintz had a strong respect for them.
In Haiti, their bloody war of independence broke all institutional continuity and the new rulers, with little education or experience, struggled to maintain a central government. As in Africa after the 1960s, the army was the only organized force. The African religion often called vodun did not provide examples as it was itself unorganized beyond a local level. Roads, schools, hospitals, banks and later, post offices hardly existed. The market system, he notes, was one of the few "systems" in operation. And so in Haiti, the often cruel and corrupt elite sucked the blood out of the nation, levying taxes, but never building anything, leaving it today (2024) in total disarray. Haiti had provided France with enormous wealth, but slavery, brutal management, war and lack of education, led to disaster still felt today. Mintz studied the market system in Haiti.
Finally he turns to Puerto Rico, still not independent. It was a way station for most of its history, a mere stop on the way to the riches of Mexico and Peru. Spain was never successful in capitalist endeavors till much later, so the plantation system was weaker than in the other two islands. There were fewer slaves and their sugar production waxed and waned over the centuries. The island never had a large population till the 20th century and so the Puerto Rican story does not resemble those of the other two.
Though it’s interesting to read about the three different societies whose fates took such different turns even if sugar played a fairly important role in all of them, the author considers different things in his discussion of each, so comparison is difficult. What does emerge is that the author admired the strength and persistence of the West Indians on all three islands, and speaks strongly about the fact that history had placed an incredible burden on the inhabitants—the survivors of what was probably the worst atrocity in human history—the slave trade from Africa.
There is an interesting discussion of creolization.
He does conclude, however, (p.191) that (…plantation slavery played a quite different part in the social, economic, and political life of each society over time, ending under entirely different conditions in each. ….. The social conditions obtaining between the slaves and the free people, both colored and white, differed as well in all three societies.”
While I think there are other books which investigate each of these societies separately and in greater depth, a comparative study like this is very useful and interesting, the added human perspective is a big plus, that’s why I’ve given it five stars
A sweet-tooth may damage your teeth, cause diabetes and be a boon to your local dentist, but that’s nothing compared to the human disaster created between 1500 and 1880 when Europeans decided that the West Indies and Brazil were ideal places to grow sugar and import it to their own continent. This offering from a respected professor at Johns Hopkins falls between history and anthropology, not so much of a standard straight-out history as a late career musing (he was 88) on three different islands in the West Indies and their relationship to the plantation system. If Jamaica, Haiti and Puerto Rico still have not become prosperous, middle-class societies, the long-lasting plantation system which smothered all other avenues to development, education, and innovation, may have had something to do with that. Mintz, over a long career, had personal experience in the islands, working with people of different statuses in society.
Mintz states that the welding of field to factory involved in sugar production, in which people had to work efficiently for long hours because the end result was time-sensitive was something that had never existed in Europe before 1500. All the best land was usurped by the plantations. The non-plantation areas, beyond the pale, harbored the poor, the runaways, the vagabonds, and fishermen. But let’s not think of New England or French Canada. The plantations were not small replicas of European society, they were frontier institutions based on violence. Sugar production was brutal and since the Indians died out or were killed and white workers did not want to do the work, slaves proved the answer. Human life was cheap; slaves had no connection to education or health. Force and unrelenting policing outbalanced rule of law. Even if you later abolish slavery, the ability to change direction drastically is dubious since you lack trained personnel and the economic system may not change so quickly.
His discussion of Jamaica struck me as closer to his personal experience. Though in a former Caribbean slave society, a discussion of race is inevitable, I don’t think noting that race and class are closely linked is an eye-opener. When slavery ended in Jamaica, the freed slaves strove to acquire land, as they did in many other parts of the New World, but the rulers of the island, again as elsewhere, paid little attention to their needs or wants. The poor wound up selling their labor for very little. The descendants of slaves struggled to establish decent lives. If their success was not untarnished, still Mintz had a strong respect for them.
In Haiti, their bloody war of independence broke all institutional continuity and the new rulers, with little education or experience, struggled to maintain a central government. As in Africa after the 1960s, the army was the only organized force. The African religion often called vodun did not provide examples as it was itself unorganized beyond a local level. Roads, schools, hospitals, banks and later, post offices hardly existed. The market system, he notes, was one of the few "systems" in operation. And so in Haiti, the often cruel and corrupt elite sucked the blood out of the nation, levying taxes, but never building anything, leaving it today (2024) in total disarray. Haiti had provided France with enormous wealth, but slavery, brutal management, war and lack of education, led to disaster still felt today. Mintz studied the market system in Haiti.
Finally he turns to Puerto Rico, still not independent. It was a way station for most of its history, a mere stop on the way to the riches of Mexico and Peru. Spain was never successful in capitalist endeavors till much later, so the plantation system was weaker than in the other two islands. There were fewer slaves and their sugar production waxed and waned over the centuries. The island never had a large population till the 20th century and so the Puerto Rican story does not resemble those of the other two.
Though it’s interesting to read about the three different societies whose fates took such different turns even if sugar played a fairly important role in all of them, the author considers different things in his discussion of each, so comparison is difficult. What does emerge is that the author admired the strength and persistence of the West Indians on all three islands, and speaks strongly about the fact that history had placed an incredible burden on the inhabitants—the survivors of what was probably the worst atrocity in human history—the slave trade from Africa.
There is an interesting discussion of creolization.
He does conclude, however, (p.191) that (…plantation slavery played a quite different part in the social, economic, and political life of each society over time, ending under entirely different conditions in each. ….. The social conditions obtaining between the slaves and the free people, both colored and white, differed as well in all three societies.”
While I think there are other books which investigate each of these societies separately and in greater depth, a comparative study like this is very useful and interesting, the added human perspective is a big plus, that’s why I’ve given it five stars
April 12, 2024
also a class read and like…sometimes i finish those and sometimes i don’t. this one i did! and it was pretty interesting but also felt like a thought dump? idk i was not SUPER aware of the timeline but it didn’t really affect my reading of it
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April 24, 2012I read this book for my Caribbean Society and Culture class in my college. It's not something I would typically pick up, but considering it was on a topic I had no interest in, I still found it to be quite good.
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February 2, 2016Some interesting details in this book, but overall it rambled in spots. An interesting thesis, arguing that Hispanic and non-Hispanic Carribbean societies developed differently.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews