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This article examines the contrasting evolution in sugar refining in Jamaica and Barbados incentivized by Mercantilist policies, changes in labor systems, and competition from foreign sugar revealing the role of Caribbean plantations as a site for experimentation from the eighteenth through mid-nineteenth century. Britain's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century protectionist policies imposed high duties on refined cane-sugar from the colonies, discouraging colonies from exporting refined sugar as opposed to raw. This system allowed Britain to retain control over trade and commerce and provided exclusive sugar sales to Caribbean sugar plantations. Barbadian planters swiftly gained immense wealth and political power until Jamaica and other islands produced competitive sugar. The Jamaica Assembly invested heavily in technological innovations intended to improve efficiency, produce competitive sugar in a market that eventually opened to foreign competition such as sugar beet, and increase profits to undercut losses from duties. They valued local knowledge, incentivizing everyone from local planters to chemists, engineers, and science enthusiasts to experiment in Jamaica and publish their findings. These publications disseminated important findings throughout Britain and its colonies, revealing the significance of the Caribbean as a site for local experimentation and knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article revisits one of the most significant questions in the historiography of British West Indian slavery and abolition. It examines the argument that the relatively weak state of the British West Indian economy from the 1780s onward was the main reason why Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807. In confronting this question of decline, the article analyzes the largest and most important slave plantation economy – Jamaica – during the early eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Using newly generated indicators such as total factor productivity and national income, the paper constructs a case for the dynamism and efficiency of the plantation system in Jamaica right up to abolition in 1807. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

El ensayo, presentado durante una conferencia de la Escuela de Diseño de la Universidad de Barcelona, España, enfoca en el tema de las casas y los hogares desde el punto de vista del historiador. El autor empieza con un análisis de la sociedad patriarcal y esclavista de las plantaciones de azúcar en Brasil y sigue con varios análisis de las sociedades de las Islas Británicas y de partes de Norte y Suramérica.