Description
Book SynopsisContact and clash, amalgamation and accommodation, resistance and change have marked the history of the Caribbean islands. It is a unique region where people under the stress of slavery had to improvise, invent and literally create forms of human association through which their pasts and the symbolic interpretation of their present could be structured.Caribbean Transformations is divided into three major parts, each preceded by a brief introductory chapter. Part One begins with a look at the African antecedents of the Caribbean, then discusses slavery and the plantation system. Two chapters deal with slavery and forced labor in Puerto Rico and the history of a Puerto Rican plantation. Part Two is concerned with the rise of a Caribbean peasantry--the erstwhile slaves who separated themselves from the plantation system on small plots of land. This creative adaptation led to the growth of a class of rural landowners producing a large part of their own subsistence but also selling to and b
Table of ContentsPreface Slavery, Forced Labor and the Plantation System Acknowledgments Caribbean Peasantries Foreword to the Morningside Edition Caribbean Nationhood Afro-Caribbeana: An Introduction Slavery and the Afro-American World Slavery and Forced Labor in Puerto Rico The History of a Puerto Rican Plantation The Origins of Reconstituted Peasantries The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages The Origins of the Jamaican Market System The Contemporary Jamaican Market System Houses and Yards among Caribbean Peasantries The Case of Haiti Caribbean Nationhood: An Anthropological Perspective References Index
