"Urgently needed, since an examination of the sugar plantation complex alone does not effectively and conclusively provide the entire picture, or detail the factors leading to the profitability of the Caribbean economy. . . . An excellent, well-thought-out compilation."--Selwyn H.H. Carrington, Howard University

The plantation economy model--at its core the sugar plantation complex that structured Caribbean society along a rigid enslaver-enslaved line--has so pervaded Caribbean historiography that it has often masked the social and economic diversification that existed in the age of sugar. Equally veiled are the gender, class, and ethnic heterogeneity of the slave-holding class and the variation in the occupations and lived experience of the enslaved population. This volume seeks to reopen discourse on Caribbean slave society by showing how diverse the economy and society really were and how varied were the experiences of the enslaved.

1. Indigo and Slavery in Saint Domingue, by David Geggus
2. Timber Extraction and the Shaping of the Culture of Enslaved Peoples in Belize, by O. Nigel Bolland
3. The Internal Economy of Jamaican Pens, 1760-1890, by B. W. Higman
4. Nonsugar Proprietors in a Sugar-Plantation Society, by Verene A. Shepherd and Kathleen E. A. Monteith
5. Coffee and the "Poorer Sort of People" in Jamaica during the Period of African Enslavement, by S. D. Smith
6. Slavery and Cotton Culture in the Bahamas, by Gail Saunders
7. State Enslavement in Colonial Havana, 1763-90, by Evelyn Powell Jennings
8. The Urban Context of the Life of the Enslaved: Views from Bridgetown, Barbados, in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, by Pedro L. V. Welch
9. Freedom without Liberty: Free Blacks in Barbados, by Hilary McD. Beckles
10. The Free Colored Population in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century, by Franklin W. Knight
11. "Quien Trabajara?": Domestic Workers, Urban Enslaved Workers, and the Abolition of Slavery in Puerto Rico, by Felix Matos Rodríguez

Verene A. Shepherd is associate professor of history at the University of the West Indies, Mona.

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"…an important contribution in expanding our understanding of the institution of slavery throughout the Caribbean." " The strength of this volume is the coverage in time, geography, and perspective that the authors are able to achieve. This is a welcome addition to the growing number of works on slavery that look beyond the sugar plantation." "Would be useful in any classroom studying slavery and the ideas advanced here should prove to be springboards for new research in the field."
--H-LatAm

"Makes a significant contribution to an under-researched aspect of Caribbean studies, by adding to the pluralist discourse on Caribbean economic and social history."
--International Third World Studies Journal and Review

"Shepherd has brought together a collection of cohesive essays that has taken aim at what could be described as Caribbean sugar teleology. The essays in this volume demonstrate that much can be learned by not dividing Caribbean historiography into rigid 'pre-plantation,' 'plantation,' and 'post-plantation periods.'
--The Americas