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BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic ...

Source: www.hbs.edu
Topic: Economic History

Sort Desciption: As an anthropologist Smith approaches the subject of economic history based on ... contribution to the economic history of the Caribbean. ...

Content Inside: BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW BOOK REVIEW Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History. By Frederick H. Smith. Gainesville: University Press of Florida 2005. xvi + 339 pp. Illustrations tables figures references notes index. Cloth $59.95. ISBN: 0-813-02867-1. Reviewed by David B. Ryden Since the publication of Eric Williamss Capitalism and Slavery (1944) historians have emphasized sugar as the factor that drove Britains colonial program during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The evidence to support this case is immense in terms of revenue and human cost for sugar firmly integrated the economic activity between the Caribbean Africa and the mainland North American settlements. World System historians claim that the early modern sugar industry succinctly illustrates one way in which the core economies of Europe grew rich by underdeveloping the periphery: stolen American lands were tilled by African laborers who were purchased by European capital. In the twenty-first century historians still find much to say about the centrality of the sugar-plantation complex to colonial history (see Stuart Schwartz ed. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World 2004). In Caribbean Rum however Frederick Smith attempts to reorient this half-century focus away from sugar and toward its seemingly irrelevant byproduct. He argues that this beverage offers a much better window for understanding the development of Caribbean society for unlike muscovado sugar which was sent to European sugar bakers for further processing rum was finished on the plantation both for local consumption and for export. Smith posits that in comparison to sugar one can learn much more about West Indian life across both space and time through an examination of the production marketing and consumption of rum. A central theme of this book is the heterogeneity of both the consumption and the production of rum. In terms of technical production rum is a messy commodity to study b ...

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