Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959

摘要

Commercially grown sugar cane has earned a distinctive reputation for transforming more than the soil on which it is cultivated. Such commonly used expressions as 'sugar enclaves', 'sugar colonies' and 'sugar plantation societies' imply not merely the establishment of individual sugar-producing units, but their proliferation and pivotal place within the socio-economic and political systems of specific areas. In the Caribbean islands the sugar industry controlled much of the economy of entire European dependencies, such as Barbados, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, in the colonial days. Intense competition over the acquisition of suitable land to grow sugar even shaped inter-imperial relations across the archipelago. In short, the sugar industry exerted considerable power, one that extended far and wide within and beyond its immediate environment.