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As more sources have been made available by the Legacies of British Slavery project, it is clear that ties between Atlantic world slavery and Queensland's sugar industry are considerably more extensive than previously understood. This article goes beyond looking at money and men to explore what this means for understandings of race, slavery and indenture on Australia's sugar plantations. It argues that slavery was understood in specific ways by West Indians after emancipation, and that race was increasingly used to bolster white supremacy, both of which adversely affected Pacific Islanders in Queensland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies how the governance of a colonial value-chain impacted upon the value-added created. The article focuses on the value-chain of colonial sugar produced in the slave plantation complex in the Americas. Previous research has suggested that British planters in the Caribbean were able to reap high profits because of a protected market for sugar in Britain. In this paper, it is argued that it was mainly British refiners that were able to profit from these protectionist policies. Wholesale prices of muscovado sugar are shown to have been more or less on a par with those prevalent under free-market conditions, whereas the price of refined sugar was considerably higher in Britain than it presumably would have been in a free-market. Limited competition and active collusion between refiners seem to have increased the mark-up on the refined sugar relative to the price of muscovado in Britain. Focusing only on the profitability on certain links in value-chains associated with the slave plantation complex in the Americas (most importantly the slave trade) might detract attention from how the governance structure of the value-chains allowed profits to be reaped elsewhere in the same value-chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, a group of young historians took up the challenge of (re) writing historical narratives about Puerto Rico's 19th century. Most of the narratives focused on the economic and social history of the island's integration into the world economy via the export trades in sugar, coffee, and tobacco. No one was more influential than Andrés A. Ramos Mattei in breaking new ground on these historical topics. I contributed a study on the sugar plantation economy of the Ponce region--the island's largest-- during the first half of the century, a period when production fell largely in the hands of enslaved workers from Africa. The essay revisits the Sugar and Slavery book with the intention of placing it in a larger historiographical context, i.e., writings on the slave-holding Puerto Rican economy and society before and since the book's publication. It concludes that while it raised some significant points, there were also meaningful gaps and silences. I consider three of these (silence on gender and its intersectionalities, missed opportunities on the study of proto-peasantry, and little attention to culture-building) for further conceptualization, calling on future historians of Puerto Rico to take these up in new and more integral investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Barbadian sugar industry was interpreted by the English scientific community in the latter seventeenth century. In particular it focuses upon the spread of ingenios (sugar mills) to Barbados from Brazil, and how this process was understood and chronicled by England’s early scientific community of experimental philosophers. It then contrasts these narratives against archived plantation documents from this period, demonstrating how these writers, despite explicit claims to the contrary, were relatively unconcerned with creating an objective account of sugar-making. Rather, they highlighted specific elements of the industry in order to make the ‘invention’ of sugar appear congruent with their new experimental methodology. These scientific narratives thus ignore a host of factors within the early Barbadian industry, particularly the critical sugar-making knowledge embodied within the plantation’s servile workforce. Rather than illuminating this facet of the industry, experimental philosophers efface these workers and portray ingenios as the laudable product of a few ingenious, experimenting white planters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Once the British transatlantic slave trade came under abolitionists' scrutiny in 1788, West Indian slaveholders had to consider alternative methods of obtaining well-needed laborers. This article examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. By focusing more on variances in work assignment and degrees of punishment rather than their absence, this article establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]