| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Stuart B. Schwartz, editor. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. 347. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50.
This essay collection merits scholarly attention. That said, neither the introduction nor the essays provide a new conceptualization of either the Atlantic world or sugar's contribution to it. Indeed, the essays are, with some exceptions, mostly rooted in the more familiar terrain of national and imperial historiographies. Scholars who want to learn more about the Atlantic world's implantation phase, however, can glean some valuable information about the sugar industry's earliest developments. Several of the volume's contributors introduce new archival evidence that either builds on or modifies existing knowledge. Perhaps as important, this volume will force us to think more precisely about the development of the sugar "industry" and its connection to the rise of slavery in its Atlantic context.	1
Editor Stuart B. Schwartz's introduction begins by citing Eric Williams's famous thesis about the connection between Atlantic sugar (and slavery) and European industrialization. Schwartz goes on to query how the Iberian colonies in the Atlantic world developed sugar earlier than the northern European colonies did but still "lagged behind in the subsequent development of capitalism" (p. 2). He quickly surmises that the answer resides in mature colonial developments of the eighteenth century, and thus readers get a quick tour of that period's more familiar scholarship. But what about the earlier period? Schwartz thinks that by looking at this period, as the book's authors do, it might be possible to develop "a newer, more nuanced vision of the origins of the Atlantic economy and the role of sugar within it" (p. 20).	. . .

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