Customer Reviews

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Studies in Comparative World History)

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3 star:		(1)
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Despite being laced with annoying typos (this is from Cambridge Univ. Press?), I found the substance of the book to be most informative. The slave-labor sugar/cotton/tobacco plantation is a familar feature of early modern history, and is usually encountered in regional histories of, say, the Caribbean, or Brazil, or the United States. But this book traces the "plantation complex" from its beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean, on Cyprus, through its spread across the Atlantic, and its final last gasps in this century. People who are used to thinking of "slave plantations" exclusively in the context of the United States will be disappointed. For reasons explained by the author, his primary focus is on the sugar plantations of the New World--these tended to be purer examples of the phenomenon. He also spends a good deal of time analyzing the impact on African societies and economies; material which I found especially instructive. The account of the stepwise demise of slavery in Brazil was also very enlightening, especially how emancipation became an economic opportunity for entire classes of slaveholding plantation owners in the 1870's, similar to "mass layoffs" today. I think this book is crucial to understanding where the "New World" stands today--racially, economically and socially. You just have to ignore the typos.

In a way I shudder at the idea of reviewing a book like Philip D. Curtin's "The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History" for the simple fact that a book containing fourteen detailed essays is daunting to summarize. Which essay should receive the most attention? The reviewer of Curtin's book soon realizes that such a question does not have an easy answer. Nearly all of the articles contained in this slim volume warrant far more attention than I can give them in a 1000 word review. I'll have to resort to sweeping generalization in the main, most likely, but that's acceptable considering the focus of these writings deals with a sweeping topic. Atlantic history is metahistory, encompassing as it does some three or four hundred years and stretching through Europe, Africa, South America, the Caribbean, and North America. It is also a story filled with tales of exploration, greed, bondage, and freedom. Atlantic history is a hot topic from what I've gathered, what with books like Marcus Rediker's "The Many Headed Hydra" gaining quite a lot of attention in the academic world. Then again, maybe I think it's a pressing subject since I've read several books on the theme for a class at school.

Curtin focuses on the rise and spread of the plantation complex, which he calls an "entity," beginning with the discovery of sugar in the Mediterranean during the time of the Crusades. Located primarily on the island of Cyprus, Europeans harvested sugar there for roughly two hundred years. With the reconquest of the Levant by Muslims, growers and consumers sought out new sources of the product. Enter the slow move into the New World and the introduction of a plantation structure that was feudalistic in nature, relied on slave labor, and was controlled by a political system overseas. The "true" plantation existed solely for profit, for supplying goods for distant markets, and needed slaves to operate the fields because the European populations had not yet overcome the numerous diseases and hardships found in the harsh climes of South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Had Europeans merely waited until they built up immunity to diseases, argues Curtin, it's quite possible slavery as we recognize it today might never have existed. He also posits the interesting observation that plantations in the American South were not "true" plantations and as such receive little mention in his articles. He's more interested in the large European concerns spreading like a plague through South America and the Caribbean.

Curtin doesn't solely examine the structure of the plantation, although he does spend some time discussing the geography of a typical sugar plantation, the types of buildings found there, how the goods went to market, and how the same forms adapted to different climates. He throws in a detailed examination of the African slave trade, how it arose, who participated in it (both Europeans and Africans readily engaged in the selling of human beings), and argues that the decline and fall of powerful African states led to an increase in the number of people available for the slave markets. The author also argues that the plantation, no matter what its location, represented a form of "cultural demography" in that the Europeans who built them moved into a region and supplanted the local population (most of them died) with non-native inhabitants. The racial and social composition of our world today is largely a result of the plantation system and the demographic changes it wrought. It's an amazing claim and one that, if accepted, equals in importance the barbarian migrations that rocked the Roman world in the fourth and fifth centuries.

Curtin postulates some theories to help explain the demise of the plantation complex, too. He contends that the democratic revolutions in the New World and Europe put an end to these exploitative economic enterprises, primarily the series of rebellions that resulted in an independent Haitian state in 1804 but also including the American and French Revolutions. Even moderate attempts at democratization in England helped bring about the abolishment of slavery (remember, American plantations don't count) and thus sealed the plantation complex's doom. Also lending a hand was the emergence of the European Enlightenment, which tended to look at non-western lands and people as "exotic," a view that planted the seeds for later anti-slavery movements and increased attention to what was going on in the mother country's backwaters. By the 1880s Brazil was freeing slaves to SAVE money because droughts and laws aimed at preventing the importation of new slaves decreased their value to the point that it was too expensive to keep them around.

"The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex" makes abundant use of detailed maps and graphs, something that, as incredible as it sounds, many history books fail to do. I did have two quibbles with the book. The first is the atrocious editing, or should I say lack of editing, that plagues nearly every page of this book. Errors are so numerous that the flow of the text is seriously hampered. And none other than Cambridge University Press published it! My second problem centers on Curtin's complaints about "Eurocentric" history and how historians ought to look beyond that bias. That might have been a problem in 1990 when the book first appeared, but even a cursory glance at the history section in the local bookstore today will reveal dozens of titles written from a decidedly non-European point of view. Despite these niggling problems, Curtin's book is a good read for both historians and interested laypersons (laypeople?) intrigued by the subject.

Despite being laced with annoying typos (this is from Cambridge Univ. Press?), I found the substance of the book to be most informative. The slave-labor sugar/cotton/tobacco plantation is a familar feature of early modern history, and is usually encountered in regional histories of, say, the Caribbean, or Brazil, or the United States. But this book traces the "plantation complex" from its beginnings in the eastern Mediterranean, on Cyprus, through its spread across the Atlantic, to its final last gasps in this century. People who are used to thinking of "slave plantations" exclusively in the context of the United States will be disappointed. For reasons explained by the author, his primary focus is on the sugar plantations of the New World--these tended to be purer examples of the phenomenon. He also spends a good deal of time analyzing the impact on African societies and economies; material which I found especially instructive. The account of the stepwise demise of slavery in Brazil was also very enlightening, especially how emancipation became an economic opportunity for entire classes of slaveholding plantation owners in the 1870's, similar to "mass layoffs" today. I think this book is crucial to understanding where the "New World" stands today--racially, economically and socially. You just have to ignore the typos.

This book is a collection of essays in which Philip Curtin integrates the plantation complex into the larger story of world history. According to Curtin, "The plantation complex was an economic and political order centering on slave plantations in the New World tropics" (xi). Curtin groups the essays in this book into four sections; each roughly dealing with a different century between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century. The book is not written in a strict narrative style, but as the title of the book suggests, it traces the plantation complex from its origins to its fall.

Curtin's book is a useful and accessible work of world history. It gives a holistic view of the plantation complex, looking at the issues involved from multiple viewpoints. This method enables the reader to place the plantation complex within the world instead of seeing it as a world unto itself. The sugar industry's production, labor, and capital all originated on different continents, making the industry at this time a truly global system.

My strongest disappointment with this book is that though it is fairly balanced, Curtin deemphasizes the American South too much. For demographic reasons, he relegates the American South to the periphery instead of the complex proper. For example, he notes that in the plantation complex, slaves composed the vast majority of the population, whereas in the American South, slaves, though numerous, were a small minority. However, even though the colonies of the American South should not be considered part of the plantation complex, perhaps it would be better to view pieces of the plantation complex as being embedded within those colonies. The entire colony of South Carolina did not resemble the Caribbean colonies, but many plantations in South Carolina resembled the Caribbean colonies more than they resembled the rest of South Carolina.

I think I've mentioned this before, but always be on the look out for history books, published by Cambridge University Press, that cost less then five bucks. Paying attention to the publisher can save you a lot of wasted reading time.

A major trend in history over the last thirty years has been the shift away from books that dealt with The History of Country X or The History of the Such and Such War to books that try to relate multiple events to one another as well as the elaboration of areas of inquiry that span separate historical subjects. A major example of this trend is the rise of "Atlantic History" which seeks to relate what happened in the new world with events in the old world in a specific and non-specious manner. In American History, the most notable authors in this area are David Hackett Fischer and his seminal Albion's Seed as well as Bernard Bailyn.

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex is a simple example of what I would call the "new atlantic history," written in an easy to read prose style that makes it accessible to anyone with an undergraduate level education. Curtin charts the rise of the Plantation complex in south America and the Caribbean with reference to the internal history of Africa, the settlement history of the New World, economic history and a heavy emphasis on demographics. It's a sophisticated, of the moment approach which undoubtably explains why the edition I read was the 13th edition of the 2nd printing (i.e. it's a hit.) Perhaps the success has something to do with the moderate length (200 pages) and almost total lack of foot notes- I'm guessing this book is an undergraduate staple in history departments on three different continents.

Not a page turner but a breathtaking work of synthesis. Fresh insights on Atlantic-world history in every chapter.

The book arrived on time and looked to be in "good" condition on the outside. Once I began reading the book I found that several pages were missing throughout.