Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Cities should have no place in Caribbean history. The dependency theorists of the 1960s and 1970s believed that capitalist agriculture in the New World centered on plantations connected not with the region in which they had been established but only with the outside world. Europe, North America, and Africa sent slaves, managers, food, and building materials in return for the proceeds of cash crops. Caribbean cities would only endanger this "system." Planters might be enticed to live and to spend money in cities, and runaway slaves could hide in them. No wonder that the only Caribbean cities worth speaking of were situated in the Spanish Caribbean, where the colonizers obviously did not know how to make money.

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Over the past twenty years, historians have given a new lease on life to the Caribbean city. The impact of the transatlantic connections seems to have been grossly exaggerated by the dependency theorists, despite the fact that before 1800 most Caribbean plantation economies were indeed more dependent on import and export than any other region. Yet new calculations show that almost half of the economic activity in the British Caribbean was generated locally, and that port cities played a central role. This book by Anne Pérotin-Dumon confirms that the same was true in the French Caribbean. The growth of Basse-Terre and Pointe-à-Pitre on Guadeloupe is a case in point, but Pérotin-Dumon's massive study (more than 700 pages of text, 250 pages of appendixes, 75 tables, and 45 figures and maps) also provides information on the plantation economy at large. As the first comparative history of the French Caribbean, it will be the main reference work for some time to come.

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