The institutions of the plantation complex reached their apogee in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. They then began to come apart for reasons that were partly internal, arising from the workings of the system itself, and partly external, from events in the greater world of European influence in the Atlantic basin. Some seeds of its destruction had been present as contradictions within the plantation complex from the beginning; others only emerged in the nineteenth century. In any event, the social and economic patterns that had governed the plantation world of the American tropics began to be dismantled during a “long century” lasting from about 1770 to 1890.

The Democratic Revolution

The fall of the plantation complex was associated with a broader set of political changes that sometimes go by the name of the “Democratic Revolution” – a phrase that groups together a series of political revolutions around the Atlantic rim. The first was the American Revolution of 1776–83, but Spanish and Portuguese attempts at imperial reform in the 1760s and 1770s were at least precursors. The American Revolution not only helped to formulate the ideology of the democratic revolutions that followed; it also brought, in time, the end of slavery in the northern United States. The French Revolution followed in 1789 – partly sparked by the American. The high cost of French participation in the American War for Independence was an important reason why the French government was forced to call a meeting of the Estates General in 1789.