Caribbean Transformations

by Sidney W. Mintz

Contact and clash, amalgamation and accommodation, resistance and change have marked the history of the Caribbean islands. It is a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create forms of human association through which their pasts and the symbolic interpretation of their present could be structured.Caribbean Transformations is divided into three major parts, each preceded by a brief introductory chapter. Part One begins with a look at the African antecedents of the Caribbean, then discusses slavery and the plantation system. Two chapters deal with slavery and forced labor in Puerto Rico and the history of a Puerto Rican plantation. Part Two is concerned with the rise of a Caribbean peasantry--the erstwhile slaves who separated themselves from the plantation system on small plots of land. This creative adaptation led to the growth of a class of rural landowners producing a large part of their own subsistence but also selling to and buying from wider markets. Mintz first discusses the origins of reconstructed peasantries, and then proceeds to the specifics of the origins and history of the peasantry in Jamaica. Part Three turns to Caribbean nationhood--the political and economic forces that affected its shaping and the social structure of its component societies. A separate chapter details the case of Haiti. The book ends with a critique of the implications of Caribbean nationhood from an anthropological perspective, stressing the ways that class, color and other social dimensions continue to play important parts in the organization of Caribbean societies.

Genres: Anthropology

355 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1974

About the author

Sidney W. Mintz was Research Professor and William L. Straus, Jr., Professor, Emeritus, in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. He was the author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Power, and the Past, among others.

Reviews

[Marilyn Sue Michel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The material is dated (1974; reprint 1989), but sadly, all of the issues continue to be a problem. The genocide of the indigenous tribes; the importation of African slaves; the later importation of Asians and East Indians as low-paid laborers; and the lateral movements from one island to another depending on plantation labor needs. The U.S. history of invasion, intervention, and attempts to impose control has also left its mark. Yet Mintz concludes that the Caribbean islands may end up leading the wave of independent identity which incorporates populations based on something other than the condition one is born into.