Description
The plantation was a total social and economic unit, supplemented with a system of routine surveillance to support nakedly unapologetic authoritarian governance that greatly shaped the very horizon of development in Caribbean societies, even long after political independence. Combining vertical relations of domination integral to extracting labour with some limited horizontal relations to aid the day-to-day functioning, the plantation fostered anticipatory obedience and instinctual habituation to unspoken imperatives. While eagerly catering towards aggressively extractive market relations this unit actively dismissed viewpoints that countered the supremacy of market forces. The interplay between domination and egalitarianism enabled processes of creolization leading to new cultural forms in speech, like picong and kas kas; new modes of kinship, like extending fictive kin and religious syncretism. But social and economic relations of production remained rooted in extraction. There may have been individual acts of resistance, but the unit’s overseers stymied democratic change the moment resistance became inconvenient. From these headwaters, post-war West Indian intellectuals sought to explain the economic structures of Caribbean societies by reference to path determinacy set by European colonial formations and the associated sequestering of surpluses. Known as ‘a Theory of Plantation Economy and Society,’ this body of thought was developed by the New World Group (comprising Lloyd Best, George Beckford, Norman Girvan, C. Y. Thomas, H. R. Brewster, and Owen Jefferson among others), this interdisciplinary project had many intellectual tributaries and confluences, in addition to a wide delta of applications and interpretations. Accordingly, in this paper I survey the arguments and analysis offered by the New World Group as their historical studies intervene in the theoretical debates on race, capitalism, and Marxism. Through doing so, I aim to contribute to a non-European and non-American approach to the historical study of race, racism, and exploitation.
