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Lecture: Sugar revolutions

This lecture will examine the creation and development of slave plantation societies across the Caribbean region and their role in the making of what Joseph Roach calls the ‘circum-Atlantic world’. It will focus in particular on the development of the plantation system in Barbados (the mid-seventeenth century ‘sugar revolution’).

Reading list

Barber, Sarah, The Disputatious Caribbean: The West Indies in the Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke, 2014).

Beckles, Hilary McD., ‘The “Hub of Empire”: The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century’, in Nicholas Canny (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 1 – The Origins of Empire (Oxford, 1998), pp. 218-240.

Beckles, Hilary, ‘Servants and Slaves during the 17th-Century Sugar Revolution’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 205-216.

Boucher, Philip, ‘The French and Dutch Caribbean, 1600-1800’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 217-230.

Candlin, Kit, The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795-1815 (Basingstoke, 2012).

Curtin, Philip, ‘The Sugar Revolution and the Settlement of the Caribbean’ in The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge, 1990), esp. Chapter 6.

Games, Alison, ‘The Atlantic Framework of 17th-Century Colonization’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 191-203.

Heuman, Gad, The Caribbean (London, 2006), chapter 2.

Higman, Barry W., A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2011), chapter 4.

Knight, Franklin W., The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (2nd edition, Oxford, 1990), pp. 88-119.

Moya Pons, Frank, History of the Caribbean: Plantations, Trade, and War in the Atlantic World (London, 2007), chapters 3-5.

Palmié, Stephan, ‘Toward Sugar and Slavery’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 131-147.

Richardson, Bonham C., ‘Plantations and their People to 1900’ in The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 33-77.

Schwartz, Stuart B. (ed.), Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 (Chapel Hill, 2004).

Sheridan, Richard B., ‘The Formation of Caribbean Plantation society, 1689-1748’, in Peter J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume 2 - The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), pp. 394-414.

Sheridan, Richard B., Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Baltimore, 1973), pp. 124-147.

Specific texts relating to Barbados can be found on the reading list for the seminar on ‘Richard Ligon in Barbados’.

For further readings on the new plantation economies, see Section IV of Hilary Beckles and Verene Shepherd (eds), Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World: A Student Reader (London, 2000).