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The Perils of Comparative History: Belize and the British Sugar Colonies after Slavery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

William A. Green
William A. Green*
Affiliation:
Holy Cross College
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Extract

For comparative history to be meaningful, the phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character. In his “Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838”, which appeared in the October 1981 issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, O. Nigel Bolland accepts this maxim in theory; he ignores it in practice.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , January 1984 , pp. 112 - 119
Copyright
Copyright   Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1984

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References

1 Green, William A., British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Expertmenu 1830–1865 (Oxford, 1976).Google Scholar

2 Bolland, O. Nigel, “Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23:4 (1981), 613.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Jamaica had a population in 1830 of about 370,000; Barbados, 83,000.

4 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, his fellow Colonial Reformers, and many of England's most highly respected political economists in the 1830s accepted the universal applicability of population density as a determinant of colonial social and economic institutions. See Morrell, W. P., British Colonial Policy in the Age of Peel and Russell (Oxford, 1930), 7–13Google Scholar; Winch, Donald, Classical Political Economy and Colonies (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), 128–43Google Scholar; Knorr, Klaus E., British Colonial Theories, 1570–1850 (Toronto, 1944), 305–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Employing evidence from plantation societies in Asia and America, George Beckford elevates this argument to a general proposition. He concludes: “The question of land was intimately bound to the problem of securing plantation labor supplies and the degree of its availability materially influenced the fate of former slaves. Where land was available, peasant production was established; and where it was not, laborers were largely forced to continue with plantation work. …” See his Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (New York, 1972), 96–97.Google Scholar

6 Bolland, , “Systems of Domination”, 592.Google Scholar

7 Ibid.