Histoire economique de la Caraibe

摘要

Guy Pierre, with the assistance of Nathalie Lamaute-Brisson and Gusti-Klara Gaillard-Pourchet, has done a great service in editing this book. It covers the period from the 1880s, when the sugar price was about to collapse, with devastating effects on the Caribbean, to the 1950s, when the Puerto Rican development model (Operation Bootstrap) was in full swing. Authors have been allowed to write in English, French or Spanish, with only the abstracts appearing in all three languages. The first part on the sugar economy deals not only with the crisis of the sugar industry after 1880, but also with its recovery in the first half of the twentieth century as a result of the sugar preferences given to almost all exporters in the Caribbean by at least one metropolitan country. The United States, for example, admitted sugar from its Caribbean colonics (Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) without tariff and gave a 20 per cent preference to Cuba. There are chapters on Guadeloupe (by Alain Buffon), Trinidad (by Rita Pemberton) and Barbados (by Pedro Welch).