Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

Fundamental tenets of colonial historiography are challenged by showing that US capital investment into this colony did not lead to the disappearance of the small farmer. Contrary to well-established narratives, quantitative data show that the increasing integration of rural producers within the US market led to differential outcomes, depending on pre-existing land tenure structures, capital requirements to initiate production, and demographics. These new data suggest that the colonial economy was not polarized into landless Puerto Rican rural workers on one side and corporate US capitalists on the other. The persistence of Puerto Rican small farmers in some regions and the expansion of local property ownership and production disprove this socioeconomic model. Other aspects of extant Puerto Rican historiography are confronted in order to make room for thorough analyses and new conclusions on the economy of colonial Puerto Rico during the early twentieth century.

Agriculture --- Farming --- Husbandry --- Industrial arts --- Life sciences --- Food supply --- Land use, Rural --- Economic aspects --- History --- Sugar plantations --- Sugar trade --- Sugar bounties --- Sugar industry --- Sweetener industry --- Sugar beet plantations --- Sugarcane plantations --- Plantations

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

In the eighteenth century, the Cul de Sac plain in Saint-Domingue, now Haiti, was a vast open-air workhouse of sugar plantations. This microhistory of one plantation owned by the Ferron de la Ferronnayses, a family of Breton nobles, draws on remarkable archival finds to show that despite the wealth such plantations produced, they operated in a context of social, political, and environmental fragility that left them weak and crisis prone. Focusing on correspondence between the Ferronnayses and their plantation managers, Cul de Sac proposes that the Caribbean plantation system, with its reliance on factory-like production processes and highly integrated markets, was a particularly modern expression of eighteenth-century capitalism. But it rested on a foundation of economic and political traditionalism that stymied growth and adaptation. The result was a system heading toward collapse as planters, facing a series of larger crises in the French empire, vainly attempted to rein in the inherent violence and instability of the slave society they had built. In recovering the lost world of the French Antillean plantation, Cul de Sac ultimately reveals how the capitalism of the plantation complex persisted not as a dynamic source of progress, but from the inertia of a degenerate system headed down an economic and ideological dead end.

Sugar plantations --- Capitalism --- Plantation owners --- Plantation overseers --- Overseers, Plantation --- Plantation managers --- Supervisors --- Owners of plantations --- Planters (Persons) --- Landowners --- Slaveholders --- Market economy --- Economics --- Profit --- Capital --- Sugar beet plantations --- Sugarcane plantations --- Plantations --- History --- Haiti --- Ayiti --- Bohio --- Haichi --- Hayti --- Haytian Republic --- Quisqueya --- Repiblik Ayiti --- Repiblik d Ayiti --- Republic of Haiti --- République d'Haïti --- ハイチ --- هايتي --- Гаити --- Gaiti --- Saint-Domingue --- Economic conditions --- Plantations de canne à sucre --- Baie --- Condition économique --- XVIIIe s. -- 1701-1800 --- Haïti --- Guadeloupe --- Ferron de la Ferronnays. --- France. --- Haitian Revolution. --- Saint-Domingue. --- early modern capitalism. --- plantation complex. --- slavery. --- sugar.