Capitalism, Slavery and Caribbean ModernityAuthor(s): Hilary McD. BecklesSource: Callaloo, Vol. 20, No. 4, Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean: A Special Issue(Autumn, 1997), pp. 777-789Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299407Accessed: 24/09/2010 00:19

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CAPITALISM, SLAVERY AND CARIBBEAN MODERNITY

by Hilary McD. Beckles

C.L.R. James' 1938 seminal text, The Black Jacobins, and Eric Williams' 1944 tour de force, Capitalism and Slavery, constitute much more than foundational works in West Indian nationalist historiography.' Both authors, born in colonial Trinidad and writing Caribbean history within its Atlantic context, made significant contributions to development discourse within the traditions of Enlightenment Idealism. As critical realists they considered popular historiography indispensable to any attempt to root philosophical ideals within recognizable terms of everyday living. In The Black Jacobins, James documents the struggles of the enslaved peoples of St. Dominique, the mercantile showpiece of French colonial capitalism in the West Indies for freedom and social justice. In addition, he details the transformation of this successful anti- slavery rebellion into something much more elaborate in terms of Atlantic history- the creation of Haiti, the Caribbean's first nation-state. In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams expands and develops the paradigm of African labor enslavement and European capital liberation, first outlined by James in The Black Jacobins, that became the basis of the revolutionary reorganization of productivity for European economic development.

The James-Williams paradigm has had an extensive discursive impact on thinking about the relationships between slavery, Atlantic modernity, and development dis- course. In the Caribbean these works represent points of departure for studies in historiographical decolonization and the signal birth of an insider, creole, nationalist canon. Both texts have received considerable criticism and enormous acclaim; they continue, half a century later, to stimulate the most expansive areas of Caribbean historical writing.2 James' explicit attention was to locate the politics of black libera- tion within the philosophies of Enlightenment discourse. Williams' related concern was to illustrate the contradictory and paradoxical nature of modernist rationality as expressed in the economic and ideological effects of the application of the principles of political economy to the relationship between colonial development and European industrialism.

Conceptually, The Black Jacobins and Capitalism and Slavery situate the Caribbean as the primordial site of Atlantic modernity, and as one of several important locations where its contradictory tendencies were acted out as ideological contest. For James, the politics of bringing Enlightenment ideas nearer to reality is seen as a mandate taken up by the enslaved against colonizing men who sought to monopolize privilege and power.3 The Caribbean in the aftermath of the Columbus enterprise is seen by Williams as culturally unique; Capitalism and Slavery is an economic study of Carib-

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bean modernity in action, while The Black Jacobins constitutes a statement of its exploding contradiction authored by subaltern people operating ideologically within the hegemonic philosophical paradigms of their oppressors.

Columbus did not lie as Caribbean culturalists and historians often assert. He "did" discover the Caribbean. It was as real for him as any construction of knowledge within a specific cultural tradition could be. He believed that he had done so, and that Europeans would encounter a new and different environment within which they could collectively discover themselves as free individuals and citizens. Europe was liberated by the experience and its subjects became citizens while the colonized became natives. The conception and construction of the "Latifundia" and "planta- tion," as the organizing principle of socio-economic life brought these worlds togeth- er. For the European they became a metaphor for renaissance economic rationality, civilizing modernity, and entrepreneurial freedom from the constraints of dehuman- izing material poverty. The colonial mission then, was a missile that launched the Caribbean, its European commanders, and African cargo on the path to modernity on board the plantation enterprise that rose on the site of native ruins.

Plantation culture was in every respect symbolic of the signs of the times. Capitalist political economy found expression during the 16th and 17th centuries in a prolifer- ation of mercantilist tracts on trade, finance, and manufacturing; their authors preached the values of large scale production, surplus generation and the accumula- tion of wealth through foreign trade. The plantation developed as evidence of institutional commitment to these principles, and in opposition to the traditional culture of peasant production which was considered backward and ruinous to a modern nation. Large scale production required extensive resource mobilization and strategic entrepreneurial planning. The Caribbean planter, therefore, was required to be globalist in both thought and action since productive resources were not readily available and had to be acquired from distant lands.

The West Indian sugar planter of the mid-17th century was celebrated as the most successful agricultural entrepreneur of the time. Such persons were also considered entirely unique and unprecedented in terms of the global scale of their operations. They were identified as icons of Europe's economic ascendancy and designated the leaders of Atlantic modernity. The global network that fed their business was truly impressive. Having pacified and, in some places, exterminated the resisting native populations, they resorted to importing servile indentured labor from "back home" and enslaved labor from Africa. They produced crops with capital and credit from Europe, imported food and building materials from mainland colonies, and exported their commodities globally. Facilitated by a transcontinental complex of brokers, agents, and financiers, the West Indian sugar planter held the known world with his gaze and made "good" with the extensive array of goods produced. Using their economic success to maximum effect, they lobbied and bought their way into metro- politan Parliaments and Imperial Courts in an effort to protect and promote the world they had made.4

The plantation was also home to other contradictory processes of modernity. Industrial technology in its most advanced state could be found there in the form of the sugar mill. Described as a "factory in the field," the sugar mill was probably

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Europe's largest industrial complex in the 16th and 17th centuries. Its deployment of state of the art production systems, energy and chemical technologies, and a disci- plined labor force set it apart as something altogether innovative and futuristic. The manner in which agricultural and manufacturing processes were articulated-field operations and the mill-also distinguished the plantation as cutting edge organiza- tional technology. It was all achieved, however, on the backs of enslaved, dehuman- ized persons. Labor systems founded on them carried titles such as "economienda," debt peonage, chattel slavery, indentureship and apprenticeship. Free wage workers constituted a very small minority, and were not institutionally encouraged. Slavery, in its many guises, was the expectation, and racialized persons categorized as "Indians" and "Africans" or colonized 'others' were targeted for life-long experiences with it.

Enlightenment discourse, then, invented the Caribbean and promoted the idea that slavery was progressive and developmental for both parties to the power relation. That Caribbean modernity should begin an outbound journey with Admiral Colum- bus taking a "sample" of island natives to Europe for sale and show as a strategy to recuperate project expenditure speaks to the way in which philosophy, economy, and morality came together as integrated systems of pro-imperialist knowledge. There was, therefore, nothing particularly phenomenal about John Locke, doyen of Enlight- enment writers on civic freedom and human liberty, owning slaves and investing in Caribbean [Bahamas] plantations.

Locke's participation as an investor in the colonial project began with the Royal African Company which, under the restored monarchy, was given a monopoly to supply enslaved Africans to the plantations in order to further the competitive interests of the English nation-state. There was nothing modern about Africans, Locke thought, that would entitle them to inclusion in discourse about the rights of individ- uals. Rather, he considered them savages to be enlightened and civilized by Europe- ans. Slavery for him, then, was a sort of beginners school in which Africans would one day acquire the basic characteristics that would entitle them to membership in civic society.

The racist nature of pro-slavery ideology that emerged in the context of slavery's expansion throughout the hemisphere tore at the intellectual and moral coherence of Enlightenment thinking and revealed it as ideologically driven knowledges con- structed to serve what Said calls the wider purpose of culturally preparing European nations, or the white "race," for the age of imperialism.5 Williams' Capitalism and Slavery outlines the economic, or "rational," reasons why slavery was preferred as the dominant labor institution by colonizers. But chattel slavery was more than a labor system; it was part of a political campaign to differentiate the European culturally from the rest of humanity and to establish representations of a self-serving ethnic pecking order for the enforcement of "otherness" upon colonized peoples. Liberty, justice, and freedom would not be legislated as real objectives for these categories of inhabitants who would be represented as outside the gaze of Enlightenment. Will- iams, furthermore, after mapping the financial circuits of wealth accumulation and money flows that made slavery viable, concluded that modern industrialism in Western Europe has its roots sunk deep in the veins of enslaved Africans.

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Modernity, then, properly understood, should be viewed from the Caribbean with ambivalence. The writings of principal pro-slavery theorists reveal the reasons why such an argument can hold. Edward Long of Jamaica, writing at the end of the 18th century, considered it sufficiently important to seek conceptual reconciliation of the reality of African slavery and the idealism of European freedom within the context of the colony's status as the wealthiest within the English Empire.6 Africans, he said, were more free as slaves in the Caribbean than as subjects under tyrannical, unac- countable monarchs and chiefs in their homelands. Slavery, for him, was an institu- tion within which Africans made real progress towards freedom; in addition, an added bonus was that they benefited from exposure to modern European culture and technologies. As a transitional state, then, slavery for Long offered Africans measur- able long term benefits, which made it ultimately a modernizing and progressive institution. These views were published with discernible strategic nuances, by writers in other imperial systems, among them, Moreau de Saint-Mery and Hilliard D'auberteuil in the French Antillean colonies.7

James' strategy in The Black Jacobins was not to engage pro-slavery theorists on the internal composition of their arguments, nor to challenge the firmness of the ground on which they were ideologically situated, but to seek terms of inclusion through the adoption of universalisms. Enlightenment, he argued, had at best a temporal relation- ship to European culture. He recognized and embraced it as a process in human development with a history that flowed through several civilizations-including those of Africa. In this sense, its European moment was just that-a passage too short to be nativized and denied its essential multicultural ancestry and texture. It was, furthermore, a merger of historical ignorance and ethnic arrogance on the part of eurocentrists who sought to show that the new conditions of social living were culturally linked to their imperial nations.

It was understandable, James believed, that Enlightenment ideals found political agency in western European societies at the moment of imperial adventurism; in these circumstances, however, they were severely compromised by the cultural needs of colonialism that centered around the promotion of slavery as indispensable to Empire. History determined that it was incumbent upon the colonized subaltern, the wretched of the earth, to claim as a right judicial and social access to these idealisms, and to do so through collective opposition to imperial power. Only such politics, James showed, could constitute the resolution of modernity's contradictions, and best illustrate the transformative powers of Enlightenment in action. The subaltern includ- ed not only slaves-the black Jacobins-but also disenfranchised women, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized groups denied social justice by managers of the imperial project. Oppositional vanguards so constituted, James believed, would ultimately bring home the true value of Enlightenment ideas and render obsolete the racism and sexism standing in the way of human progress.

James chose the Haitian Revolution, 1791-1804, as the discursive device best suited to giving intellectual coherence and social reality to his argument. It was not surpris- ing that enslaved blacks and their free mixed race allies in St. Dominique took the anti- slavery revolt to the revolutionary stage by seizing the State and declaring national independence. St. Dominique was the most populous and financially attractive

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colony in the Caribbean at the end of the 18th century. The relationship between slavery and capitalism, as conceived by Williams, had combined to render the economy the golden crown of colonial success. At the same time, argued James the Marxist dialectician, anti-slavery consciousness among enslaved blacks and disgrun- tled mixed race peoples, as well as their organizational skills, were highly developed. Anti-slavery mentalities with revolutionary commitment were being created at a rate in the colony that corresponded with its reputation as the producer of the most of everything in the Caribbean. Toussaint L'Ouverture, revolutionary leader and theo- retician of Enlightenment praxis, appeared the logical and inevitable consequence of a society so proud of its economic success.

But James did not end his analysis here; he went on to explain that in as much as slavery was a product of Renaissance rationality, anti-slavery politics was the social effect of modernist idealism. No other figure in the Atlantic, he suggests, was as perfect an example of Enlightenment activism as Toussaint. The struggle in the colony for the liberty of man against the enormous weight of feudal backwardness and reactionary opinion constitutes the epic drama of the quest for Caribbean modernity. The Americans had gone to war against British colonial exploitation and won. Driven, they said, by the thirst for liberty, the philosophical idealism of their contest was compromised and betrayed by the decision to keep chattel slavery as the principal organizing social institution within the new, independent dispensation.

The American Revolution was tarnished and discredited by this unwillingness to declare the liberty of all persons. Citizens were forced by the inevitable maturing of the politics in which they were engaged to go back a century later to the battlefield in order to resolve the matter by one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history. French revolutionaries abolished slavery in 1794 and restored it a few years later because they could not see national interests being served better without it. The blacks of St. Dominique, then, were first to declare the universality of liberty, to build it into the national constitution of Haiti, and commit a State to eternal opposition to chattel slavery. Enlightenment idealism was rescued and historically legitimized by en- slaved people who were not expected to be its beneficiaries. Without Haiti as its principal expression, James would suggest, Enlightenment idealism would soon have been discredited as ruling class philosophy serving limited self-interests.8

If James' concern was to illustrate Europe's and the Caribbean's conflictual philo- sophical passage to modernity, Williams' text was conceived as an articulation of slavery's changing relationship to economic rationality. Primitive capitalism, Will- iams showed, called slavery into being as the main mechanism of wealth accumula- tion, while advanced capitalism driven by industrial and scientific technologies banished it from whence it came, aided by the instrument of Parliamentary legislation acting within a context of moral and philosophical outrage. It was the triumph of the market, argued Williams, not the long-in-coming assistance of Enlightenment moral idealism that made legislated emancipation all the more magnificent and historically seminal. William Wilberforce, the man of the moment, says Williams, should not be diminished within this materialist interpretation of history; rather he should be accurately situated and understood as leader of a "political" strategy that may have forestalled the production in the Caribbean of a thousand Toussaints.9

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Emancipationism as parliamentary politics, however, took nearly one hundred years to sweep the region clean of chattel slavery across imperial lines. The Spanish were first to establish slavery and the last to relinquish it, a history according to James that accounts in great part for Cuba's dramatic entry into revolutionary socialism under Fidel Castro. Capitalist economic rationalization, as Williams argued, may well have been the hidden force behind the Parliamentary legislative anti-slavery strategy. The industrial and commercial maturity of capitalism was rather drawn out in the Spanish Empire, and the economic history of slavery in its Caribbean colonies illustrates this all too well. Slavery was finally toppled by a largely creole, politically complex opposition that featured prominently the slaves themselves who went to great lengths, as anti-colonial anti-slavery revolutionaries, to win their liberty.

If the freeing of the "lower" orders, as Cromwellian revolutionaries called the working classes, was a principal feature of the onset of modernity, the Caribbean "slave" within Jamesian analysis, was ahead of the times as a self-liberator. In the case of Haiti they seized a State and molded a world in accordance with their own ideological praxis. For James, a practical effect of plantation production was to advance the proletarianization of the enslaved worker. Outside the judicial process that defined them as slaves, the African worker was certainly the prototype of the modern industrial worker. Organized by a division of labor into discrete productive units, trained in a sophisticated way as skilled artisans (particularly in the case of the sugar refinery personnel), and as middle managers (in the case of drivers and overseers), plantation slaves contributed to a political discourse that promoted the democratic values of social justice and equality. In this way they ensured the social unacceptability of slavery as a fascist relationship of power, and centered Enlighten- ment ethos within popular culture.

1804, rather than 1917, was for James the first fulfilment of this ethos. The rise of the Haitian state rather than the Soviet Republic constitutes that first moment in modernity when the alienated and dispossessed seized control of their destiny and emerged the subjects of a new world order. Haiti became the mirror within which Europe saw itself as the Janus-divided to the soul-of its own contradictory imperial experiment. The civilizing mission became the journey of a thousand atrocities that culminated in genocidal actions against natives that refused to give up their lands, liberties, and lives. When President Dessalines in 1804 named the new republic Haiti-reinstating the island's Arawakan language identity-it was an act of heroic self-denial that placed the struggle of Africans and mixed race peoples in a secondary relation to the struggle of those who had greeted the Columbus mission and were later sunk by its missiles. 1804, then, was at once torpedo launch and the inauguration of a new order in which it was demonstrated that the rights of man could be achieved through resistance from below by the disenfranchised.

These movements for liberty were accompanied by a literature within which the enslaved spoke back and countered the ideological representations established with- in the texts of slave owners and their authorized supporters. Slaves wrote memoirs, letters, and narrated their life stories to collaborators in the anti-slavery struggles. This literature constitutes the canon of a Caribbean political philosophy. The memoirs of Mary Prince, the autobiographies of Esteban Montejo and Equiano, and other such

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texts exposed the cosmologies of enslaved communities, and situated individuals within the wide, elastic vanguard of anti-slavery consciousness and politics.10 Taken outside its immediate situation, this literature, in which the subaltern speaks, illumi- nates their socially uncompromised and intellectually honest attachment to Enlight- enment idealism. A comparative reading of Locke on liberty and Mary Prince on freedom should expose the emptiness of Eurocentric race and class claims to textual authority, and validates James' belief that the speeches of Toussaint L'Ouverture were among the finest on the subject.

But this literature of the enslaved goes some distance beyond its strategic engage- ment with Enlightenment philosophy. It constitutes the beginning of a postcoloniality in which African and Afro-Creole identities and ontologies are set out in subversive opposition to imperialism. Certainly, no postcolonial literary theory should emerge without a departure from this textual tradition that questions and rejects aspects of the European philosophical canon. Anti-slavery was undoubtedly an Atlantic move- ment, but the slaves, noted both Williams and James, were at the core of it. They were on the ground, developing resistance strategies as features of everyday life, and ultimately were the ones who implemented the first, and numerically the largest, act of emancipation. Furthermore, this early black literary tradition breaks with Enlight- enment idealism on issues such as individualism, family, sex, ethnic and gender relations, religion and spirituality, perceptions of materialism, cultural difference, and the existence of universalisms.

The demographic and cultural tendency towards hybridity and creolity, for exam- ple, that simultaneously divided and united the social experiences of all persons within slave society, stands ultimately as an oppositional movement to white suprem- acy ideologies as well as an early affirmation of interculturalisms that now challenge identity politics in the postcolonial world. The self-assault upon notions of "racial" purity by managerial males of Empire, whose exploitative sexual engagements with black women stands as a marked feature of colonial society, indicates the public fragility and private irrelevance of the race theories that underlie European Enlight- enment thinking. The size of mixed race populations can hardly be considered a reasonable measure of the extent of interracial sexuality. Rather, it should be seen as evidence of the failure to publicly suppress the private. Inevitably, the changing face of Caribbean society came to testify to the truth that colonialism lied. Hybridity was as much a subversive feature of the Caribbean's contradictory experience with modernity as any other, and may very well be an understated, if not negated, example of the "Empire striking back"-even if ironically, at itself.1"

Freedom was demanded on all sides, but its meaning and social application in the hands of blacks went in directions radically different from those expected by Europe- an anti-slavery activists and thinkers. For this reason, English emancipation in action became a contested experience in which blacks had little reason to believe that "massa day" was done. Post-slavery societies were politically charged with a protest culture that rendered them as unstable as their slavery antecedents. This can also be said of Haiti. Slave revolutionaries became petty peasants and disgruntled laborers within the nation-state and challenged the definition of freedom imposed by the military- landowning elite. They voiced with their feet, undermined the productive capability

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of the economy, and forced the state to implement the 1826 Rural Code that sought to tie them to the land and penalized those who preferred unemployment or hillside squatting.

Europeans and Africans, then, engaged Enlightenment discourse in similar and different ways. Differences, were magnified by the challenges of postslavery recon- struction. While Europeans could understand, and in some instances support, blacks' claims to social freedom, they could not agree that social justice required this freedom be rooted in conditions such as land ownership, the political franchise, access to respectable professions, and involvement in large scale mercantile activities. Blacks should be free to work for whites, they concluded, and be driven to do so by the threat of hunger and an unrelenting criminal justice system. European abolitionists, then, found it difficult to support blacks' demand for economic and political enfranchise- ment as articulated by their community leaders.

Meaningful land reform was out of the question. The plantation had to stay as symbolic and representative of economic globalization and white supremacy, and as a sentinel against Afrocentric peasant empowerment. Enlightenment, therefore, crashed on the rocks of the Emancipation it had supported in theory, and provided once again the philosophical basis of a repressive, authoritarian colonial political culture. The defense of the plantation as a civilizing strategy, to ensure that the journey of modernity was advanced, was articulated in the face of considerable black opposition to it as the principal institutional oppositional force to their realization of social freedom. The economic decline of Haiti was represented by whites as moder- nity in reversal. The peasant was backward-looking and tied to Afrocentric culture. The plantation was progressive and tied to European culture. Haitianization for whites became the metaphor for the end of Enlightenment. Blacks maintained that in Haiti they were empowered, had capsized the European project, and were free despite their increasing material poverty. They were not going backward, but were charting a progressive new path for mankind.

These developments when taken collectively speak to the central paradigmatic feature of Caribbean modernity, the rise of the common citizen to institutional and cultural leadership. While the Haitian experience has no parallel in world history, the general Caribbean process that now sees the offspring of slaves in control of State apparati must be considered a principal expression of social freedom. That consider- ations of race affected adversely the ways in which European radicals received Haitian leadership in the early years, and that Caribbean societies continue today to be torn and tortured by ethnic conflict, should help to reinforce the argument that by turning the world upside down, Caribbean people found themselves having to cope with postmodern issues while still attached firmly to the modernist paradigm. Indications of this contradictory motion can be found in the personalities and preferences of both James and Williams, distinguished humanist "Western" intellec- tuals (read English) but ideologically steeped in an anticolonial milieu that forced them to be deconstructionist and postmodernist at a time when it was not fashionable.

James considered himself uncompromised in the opinion that the Caribbean was not only at the heart of the "West," but that the "West" was invented in the Caribbean. Williams agreed, but recognized as James did that the "South" of this "West" meant

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that different forms of knowledges had to be constructed in order to function strategically. The challenge for Caribbean intellectuals, therefore, had long been to destabilize and deconstruct hegemonic notions of the "West" in order to define the Caribbean as a "southernized" western project with its peculiar oppositional politics and identity. These strategic intellectual positions did not always win favor with radical political opinion. As a result many Caribbean people have gone for a sterile Columbus-bashing approach. They argue that the Columbus mission was traumatic and had a profound but backward moral impact upon the modern Atlantic world; such persons have failed to grasp the significance of the invisible cargoes that Columbus carried, but this is where the analysts should begin, argued Williams and James.

On board, Williams tells us, were several unseen commodities: an economic ideology which was not yet labeled nor understood, but which came to be understood as something called commercial capitalism; the ideology of racism which at that time was not clearly articulated, but which rooted itself in the Caribbean; the social ideology of patriarchy which assumed the superior political and intellectual capacity of men over women; an intolerant Christian theology which defined other religions as primitive subtypes; an expansionist imperialist consciousness that focused on total territorial acquisition; and a rationalist philosophy that promoted the notion of materialism as the way forward for mankind. All of these things represented what the Caribbean voyage was all about. Columbus was not only a courageous sailor; he was a leader, an emissary of a new epoch, the flag bearer of market forces that had become endemic to European social culture and of a civilization which was beginning to sail out of centuries of decay and stagnation and finding its identity within the context of an imperialist experience in the Caribbean.

Commercial capitalism signaled the beginning of the integration of the continents of the world into one economic system. It was in the Caribbean vortex of the Atlantic Basin that this international capitalism took its early cultural and social identity. Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have documented very carefully the impact of the slave trade and slavery upon world trades. They now know, for example, how it called into being African resources, and the ways in which they were deployed upon the foundation of Amerindian genocide. Much of the discussion that is taking place in the Caribbean today about cultural identity, race, sovereignty and the fragmented processes of nation-building, are all part of this legacy.

It is important to comment on the ideology of racism. For centuries prior to the Caribbean connection, it was rare to find within the literatures of Europe a systematic theoretical formulation of a white over black ideology. Slavery, of course, had preceded Atlantic colonialism, but the notion of black inferiority was not popular. Indeed, many of the slave systems of pre-Columbian Europe and the Mediterranean were based on a multiracial understanding of labor organization. As a result, there- fore, most ethnicities experienced some degree of enslavement to others. In the enslaved labor gangs working on the estates, vineyards, and in the mines of southern Europe, many ethnicities could be found. It was after the Caribbean mission that slavery developed specific racial dimensions, and the anti-black ideologies became culturally established within Europe. By the mid-16th century it was widely repre-

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sented in European texts that blacks were suited for subordinate slave relationships within the colonial order.

The association of materialist expansion with human progress in Enlightenment discourse reinforced commitment to this ideological development. It was accepted by colonial whites that the march towards economic development required the system- atic enslavement of blacks. There was a clearly formulated view that it was necessary, morally legitimate, not only to enslave persons, but also to exterminate conquered people in an attempt to confiscate lands. The plantations had to be productive, and the mines had to go deeper; these objectives required land and servile labor. It was not possible to organize a free labor force in the war zones of the Caribbean. In addition, it was the belief and experience of Europeans that colonial frontiers were best developed and restructured by slave labor. The Caribbean, therefore, was constructed at the center of a new philosophical and economic order. It was the theater where a new dispensation took shape and first matured.

The principle of political economy that international trade was the surest way to achieve self-sustained economic development was articulated by advocates of colo- nialism in the 17th century who promoted the critical role of the Caribbean plantation system in wealth creation. What Williams demonstrated was that without the Carib- bean's role in the colonial complex there would have been no 18th-century English Industrial Revolutions; and no English imperial ascendancy in the 19th century. C.L.R. James went further and developed the concept that West Indian people now represent, because of that history, a unique cultural type. Within the Caribbean new mentalities and identities were created: a new people who represent a melange of European, African, Amerindian and Asian ancestry. Almost every major civilization in the world was brought to the Caribbean in order to sustain the conditions for colonial economic growth. The West Indian, therefore, is a futuristic individual, linked to all major civilizations. They are the first products of the modern world system.

When James' concept of the West Indian is placed alongside Williams' thesis, which shows how the Caribbean slave plantation complex generated wealth and created financial institutions for the modern world economic order, then it becomes necessary to look at the cultural role of race and color within contemporary market economies. People of European ancestry continue to dominate resource ownership in Caribbean societies despite their loss of political leadership. In this regard, Columbus still sails! The western white world did to Cuba in the 20th century what they did to Haiti in the 19th; imposition of international commercial blockade, refusal to grant financial assistance, and general economic sabotage. No modern nation can now survive without international connections. To understand the electoral defeat of Michael Manley's Jamaican socialism, the cannibalization of the Grenadian Revolu- tion, attempts to cripple the Cuban Revolution, requires first a study of the history of the Haitian Revolution. The region has gone through all this before. There is nothing new about it.

The Caribbean, then, has had a turbulent and divisive experience with modernity. Contests have been waged with Enlightenment discourse at all leads. Political, intellectual and cultural work in the region demonstrates this. One of the more

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important intellectuals of the Caribbean who stood at the crossroads of these polemics was J.J. Thomas, also a Trinidadian. By the 1860s and 1870s, Thomas was a formidable oppositional writer, political ideologue, and philosopher. He spent many years explaining and rebutting the racist Enlightenment opinions of 19th-century English intellectuals such as Anthony Froude and Thomas Carlyle. Froude had visited the Caribbean after emancipation, and on his return to England wrote a book in which he said that an injustice was done to black people when granted emancipation because they were culturally regressing, spending their days eating pumpkins and sleeping under coconut trees. He was supported by Carlyle who argued, in an essay entitled "On the Nigger Question," that emancipation represented a retreat from the princi- ples of progress and that the future of the region was bleak. Thomas exposed the race, class, and gender contradictions of European Enlightenment discourse, and spoke in defiance on the specific and unique features of a discrete Caribbean modernity.12

Tensions and contest with Caribbean modernity in turn could not be contained within the islands. They breached the walls of the insulating Caribbean Sea and began a journey to energize liberation struggles in those places from which it had drawn ancestral populations. Garveyism emerged as a Pan-African paradigm which main- tained that European modernity in all its forms must be resisted and defeated at all costs: philosophically in the academies, in the market relations of the economy, in culture and the arts.13 The challenge to oppressed people to mobilize against racism and Empire was taken up and Garveyism spread like "wild fire" throughout the colonized communities: over five hundred branches in North and South America and Africa, in addition to hundreds in the Caribbean. Having embraced the Caribbean, Garveyism went global, representing the voice of Africans and all racially exploited people. Euro-American elites sought to contain Garvey in much the same way that the Haitian missile was contained.

The contest of Caribbean modernity continued. The Cuban Revolution which consolidated the region's socialist cosmology linked its own specific struggles with those of colonized people on the other side of the Atlantic. In much the same way that Trinidadians, George Padmore and C.L.R. James, were critical ideologues and activ- ists in the liberation of Ghana, Cuban troops made possible the driving of imperial Portuguese and racist South African armed forces from Angola and the subsequent winning of independence for Namibia. In these dialectical ways Caribbean moderni- ty, though fractured, torn and tortured, came to participate in the political liberation of African people.

Despite the pervasiveness of these struggles, and the successes of the indepen- dence movements of the post-war era, there remain people in the Caribbean trapped in colonial relationships.14 They are powerless with respect to resource ownership, and their economies cannot independently sustain adequate levels of material living. George Lamming, however, has consistently made the wider point with respect to the empty formality of constitutionally independent nation-states, that those who govern don't rule.15 Ethnic minorities who have recently arrived, and those who inherited the mantle of a restructured slave mode of production, are still very much in control of the economic destiny of the region. The historical forces of continuity and change suggest that the overlap of modernity in crisis with postmodern discourses are creating in the

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region new conceptual frontiers for theoretical analysis. While one group of citizens celebrate "Discovery Day" and another "Emancipation Day," the past continues to dwell in the present and the resultant turbulence produces the enormous energy sources that define and propel the cultural revolution that is the Caribbean.

NOTES

1. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker and Warburg, 1938); a French edition appeared in 1949, an Italian edition in 1968, and a German edition in 1984. The text was converted for the stage by the English National Opera in 1979 and 1983; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). For the debate over Williams' thesis see Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman, (eds), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

2. See C.L.R. James, "Presence of Blacks in the Caribbean and its Impact on Culture," C.L.R. James: At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison and Busby, 1984); Neil Lazarus, "Doubting the New World Order: Marxism, Realism and the Claims of Postmodernist Social Theory," Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.3 (1991): 94-137; Hilary McD. Beckles, "Capitalism and Slavery: The Debate Over Eric Williams," Social and Economic Studies 33.4 (1984): 171-91.

3. See Kent Worcester, "C.L.R. James and the Question of the Canon," C.L.R. James' Caribbean, ed. Paul Buhle and Paget Henry (Durham: Duke University Press, 1982); also Paul Buhle, C.L.R. James: the Artist and Revolutionary (London: Verso, 1989).

4. See Richard Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the West Indies 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 (Bridgetown: Caribbean Universities Press, 1974).

5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978); The World, the Text, and the Critics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); "Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors," Critical Inquiry 15.2 (1989): 205-25.

6. Edward Long, History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774). 7. Moreau de Saint-Mery, Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique, et Historique de la

Partie Francaise de L'Isle Saint-Domingue, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1779); Hilliard d'Auberteuil, Considerations sur L'etat Present de la Colonies Francaise de Sainte-Domingue, 2 vols. (Paris, 1776- 1777).

8. See Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 252-65; Baron de Vastey, Essai sur les causes de la Revolution et des guerres civiles d'Hayti (Sans Souci, 1819) and Le Systeme colonial devoile (Cap Henry, Haiti, 1814).

9. See Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (197-208); "the alternatives were clear" in 1833, says Williams, "emancipation from above or emancipation from below. But EMANCIPATION" (208).

10. Moira Ferguson, (ed)., The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself [1831] (London: Pandora Press, 1987); Paul Edwards, (ed), Equiano's Travels: His Autobiography [1789] (London: Frank Cass, 1967); Miguel Barnet, (ed), The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave: Esteban Montejo (London: MacMilliam, 1993).

11. See Bill Ashcroft, et al, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989); Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, (eds), De-Scribing Empire: Postcolo- nialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994); Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995).

12. Bridget Brereton, "J.J. Thomas: An Estimate," Journal of Caribbean History 9 (1977): 22-42; J.J. Thomas, Froudacity (Port of Spain, 1889); J.A. Froude, The English in the West Indies (London, 1888); Carl Campbell, "John Jacob Thomas of Trinidad," African Studies Association of the West Indies Bulletin 8 (Kingston, 1965): 26-42; William Cohen, "Literature and Race: Nineteenth- Century French Fiction, Blacks and Africa, 1800-1900," Race and Class 16.2 (1974): 56-76.

13. F.D. Cronin, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1955); Amy Jacques-Garvey, (ed), Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

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(Dover: Majority Press, 1986); R. Lewis and P. Bryan, Garvey: His Works and Impact (University of the West Indies, Mona: Institute for Social and Economic Research, 1988); Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA (Dover: Majority Press, 1996).

14. Rene Depestre, "Problems of Identity for the Black Man in the Caribbean," Caribbean Quarterly 3 (1973): 55; Frank Moya Pons, "Is there a Caribbean Consciousness?" Americas 31.8 (1979): 72- 76; Eugenio Pereira Salas, "The Cultural Emancipation of America," The Old and the New Worlds: Their Cultural and Moral Relations (Basle: UNESCO, 1956), 34-36.

15. See George Lamming, "In Search of Great Truths," Caricom Perspectives 66 (1996): 8-13; Coming, Coming, Home: Conversations II (St. Martin: House of Nehesi, 1995), 37, 40-42.

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