Review of The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex by Philip D. Curtin

In Navigating World History, Patrick Manning defines world history as “the story of connections within the global human community.”  In The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, historian Philip D. Curtin focuses on the connections contained within the plantation complex, a specific economic system that arose in the fifteenth century and continued into the twentieth.  Across several continents, between several cultures, and embracing a wide political and social spectrum, the plantation complex was unique among worldwide trading and agricultural systems.  Through his use of comparative analysis, Curtin outlines an economic and social structure that seems to hold little place for the agency of people themselves.  Yet, in the end, it was people who paid the price for the plantation complex and all that it did to shape the Americas, Asia, and Europe.

Curtin employs the methodology of comparative analysis in his study of the plantation complex, a standard in the world historian’s toolbox.  Beginning with a comparison of the Atlantic and Mediterranean sugar growers, he expands to include comparisons of the different types of settlement structures found in the New World, the geographical features of areas participating in the Sugar Revolution, and eventually the different paths to democracy taken by European states and their American colonies.  As with Kenneth Pomeranz in his use of reciprocal analysis in The Great Divergence, Curtin is careful not to denote any one region or system as the “norm.”  Rather, his analysis is a tool by which to put the various systems and their geographical and cultural differences into context, helping his readers to grasp the wide variety of factors at play within the overall structure of the plantation complex.

Curtin is careful to identify the parameters of the system that he considers the plantation complex and how the complex differed from other agricultural and trading systems.  Among the factors that made the planation complex unique are:  (1) the majority of the people involved in the system were slaves taken from Africa; (2) the population was not self-sustaining, meaning that a continuous stream of new immigrants was necessary to meet the need for labor; (3) the agriculture was organized within  large-scale capitalist plantations, larger than any then in use in Europe; and (4) the plantations were centered around one export crop, with subsistence needs met through import.  These plantations advanced technologically as they moved westward, reaching their apogee with the great sugar plantations in the Caribbean.  Once established in the Americas and along the islands of the Caribbean, each society within the complex developed in its own way, specific to the geographical limits of its location and the political and economic conditions imposed by its “mother country.”

In the end, according to Curtin, it was the rise of democracy across Europe and the Americas that led to the eventual abolition of the slave trade and emancipation of the slaves themselves.  While the system remained economically viable, it was the moral and intellectual reasoning behind abolition that eventually ended the slave system, even when that moral and intellectual reasoning did not derive from the nation itself but rather from pressure from external trading partners, as was the case with the abolition of slavery in Brazil.  With the end of slavery, the plantation complex reached its own end.  Yet coerced labor in the field of agriculture did not end—contract laborers from India and Asia suffered the very same exploitative abuse as the slaves they replaced, with the sole exception being the impermanence of their indenture.

If there is a critique to be offered up to Curtin and his work on the plantation complex, it would be the usual one aimed at economic history:  where are the people?  The overarching economic structures that Curtin identifies are so constraining that the human actors are either nonexistent or so limited in their options that the system sweeps them along like so much flotsam on the sea.  At first glance, it is tempting to compare Curtin’s distant approach with the human-friendlier analysis provided by Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik in The World that Trade Created.  Not only is their narrative more engaging, Pomeranz and Topik include vignettes on the actual people who influenced trade between Asia and Europe.  By contrast, Curtin writes with a cold, academic style and his focus on structure allows for nearly no mention of individual actors. 

To many it may come as a surprise then that Curtin has a very valid reason for the distance with which he treats his subject, a reason more compelling than one that merely reiterates that economic history is, by nature, a story of process rather than people.  Curtin notes the difficulties for Euro-Americans when it comes to the discussion of slavery, a topic that brings up feelings of “guilt, shame, and the attempt to assess blame for atrocities committed by people long since dead.”  By focusing on the distant and unfeeling field of economics, Curtin sidesteps the emotionally charged reactions that his readers may experience when reading an analysis of the slave system.  While this has the side-effect of keeping the human factor at bay, it allows for a more impersonal and, ultimately, effective analysis.

With no footnotes or bibliography, it can be difficult to assess the academic integrity of The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex.  Readers must rely on the good reputation of author Philip Curtin, whose success as an African scholar included a 1983 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, a steady stream of books and articles across his career, and a stint as president of the American Historical Association.   His strength as an historian will also help his readers work past the multitude of typing errors that plague the paperback second edition of The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex and the lack of a strong cohesive narrative thread holding the individual essays together.

While The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex is challenging to read, due to the complex nature of the topic and the dryness of the narrative, the information contained within its covers goes a long way toward helping future historians understand the importance of world history as a field of study and the wonderful variety of topics that are available for future research.