Dale Tomich

Material Process and Industrial Architecture: Innovation on The Cuban Sugar Frontier, 1818–1857

While scholars have commonly inquired into how capital structures the material world, far less attention has been paid to how the material world has structured the historical relations of the capitalist world economy. This chapter is concerned with the expansion of Caribbean sugar industry in the world economic conjuncture of the first half of the nineteenth century. It examines the relation of the material requirements of sugar production, regional geography, and productive space. The ability of planters in particular locations to respond to world economic conditions was subject to material and spatial constraints. Increased output and technological innovation were dependent on the creation of new productive spaces – including both the formation of new commodity frontiers and the reconstitution the sugar plantation – that conformed to the changing requirements of sugar manufacture. Thus, the spatial and material conditions of staple production shaped the pattern of accumulation and political economic development.

Sugar technology and slave labor in Martinique, 1830-1848

Examination of the transformation of the world and national sugar markets during the first part of the 19th century. At that time conditions for improvements in productive technique that developed this integration of agricultural and manufacturing processes to its fullest extent were created.

Rethinking Bourgeois Revolutions

The appearance of Volume Four of Immanu el Wallersteins The Modern World-System marks the completion of one of the major scholarly contributions of the past fifty years. The University of California Press is to be congratulated for making the complete work available, especially to a younger gen eration of graduate students and scholars. The Modern World-System is an ambitious if not audacious work that is at once complex and demanding. It attempts to accomplish two things simultaneously. On the one hand, it puts forth the theoretical and meth odological foundations for a new unified historical social science. On the other hand, it is a monumental but highly compressed interpretation of the history of the capitalist world-economy, and through that lens, world history, over the past five hundred years. The two tasks are closely related but they are not identical. In the prologue to the new edition, Wallerstein calls attention to what he sees as the major issues entailed in Volume Three, The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s and capably defends his posi tions. Here I am less concerned with his his

Rethinking Bourgeois Revolutions Transformations of the World-System, 1730-1840s

The appearance of Volume Four of Immanu el Wallersteins The Modern World-System marks the completion of one of the major scholarly contributions of the past fifty years. The University of California Press is to be congratulated for making the complete work available, especially to a younger gen eration of graduate students and scholars. The Modern World-System is an ambitious if not audacious work that is at once complex and demanding. It attempts to accomplish two things simultaneously. On the one hand, it puts forth the theoretical and meth odological foundations for a new unified historical social science. On the other hand, it is a monumental but highly compressed interpretation of the history of the capitalist world-economy, and through that lens, world history, over the past five hundred years. The two tasks are closely related but they are not identical. In the prologue to the new edition, Wallerstein calls attention to what he sees as the major issues entailed in Volume Three, The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s and capably defends his posi tions. Here I am less concerned with his his

Africa and the Americas: Interconnections during the Slave Trade. Edited by José C. Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 338. Illustrations. Tables. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

tic vision of a complicated century of rural history. The resulting work, although at times dense, is very absorbing. One might wish that he had more thoroughly analyzed the strands of political rhetoric deployed during conflicts. Perhaps he could have expanded his vision of the vanilla business to discuss how the flavor itself was a cultural commodity or to more carefully consider the forms of labor and knowledge involved in the business. Finally, Kouri is perhaps too reluctant to suggest what his work can say about the process of privatization in Mexico more generally. Still, these are debatable points, and in the end the book is one that every historian of rural Mexico needs to read.