William Roseberry, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy
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Book Reviews -William Roseberry, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Peasants and capital: Dominica in the world economy. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, 1988. xiv + 344 pp. -Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Robert A. Myers, Dominica. Oxford, Santa Barbara, Denver: Clio Press, World Bibliographic Series, volume 82. xxv + 190 pp. -Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Robert A. Myers, A resource guide to Dominica, 1493-1986. New Haven: Human Area Files, HRA Flex Books, Bibliography Series, 1987. 3 volumes. xxxv + 649. -Stephen D. Glazier, Colin G. Clarke, East Indians in a West Indian town: San Fernando, Trinidad, 1930-1970. London: Allen and Unwin, 1986 xiv + 193 pp. -Kevin A. Yelvington, M.G. Smith, Culture, race and class in the Commonwealth Caribbean. Foreword by Rex Nettleford. Mona: Department of Extra-Mural Studies, University of the West Indies, 1984. xiv + 163 pp. -Aart G. Broek, T.F. Smeulders, Papiamentu en onderwijs: veranderingen in beeld en betekenis van de volkstaal op Curacoa. (Utrecht Dissertation), 1987. 328 p. Privately published. -John Holm, Peter A. Roberts, West Indians and their language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 vii + 215 pp. -Kean Gibson, Francis Byrne, Grammatical relations in a radical Creole: verb complementation in Saramaccan. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Creole Language Library, vol. 3, 1987. xiv + 294 pp. -Peter L. Patrick, Pieter Muysken ,Substrata versus universals in Creole genesis. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, Creol Language Library - vol 1, 1986. 315 pp., Norval Smith (eds) -Jeffrey P. Williams, Glenn G. Gilbert, Pidgin and Creole languages: essays in memory of John E. Reinecke. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1987. x + 502 pp. -Samuel M. Wilson, C.N. Dubelaar, The petroglyphs in the Guianas and adjacent areas of Brazil and Venezuela: an inventory. With a comprehensive biography of South American and Antillean petroglyphs. Los Angeles: The Institute of Archaeology of the University of California, Los Angeles. Monumenta Archeologica 12, 1986. xi + 326 pp. -Gary Brana-Shute, Henk E. Chin ,Surinam: politics, economics, and society. London and New York: Francis Pinter, 1987. xvii, 192 pp., Hans Buddingh (eds) -Lester D. Langley, Howard J. Wiarda ,The communist challenge in the Caribbean and Central America. With E. Evans, J. Valenta and V. Valenta. Lanham, MD: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. xiv + 249 pp., Mark Falcoff (eds) -Forrest D. Colburn, Michael Kaufman, Jamaica under Manley: dilemmas of socialism and Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access democracy. London, Toronto, Westport: Zed Books, Between the Lines and Lawrence Hill, 1985. xvi 282 pp. -Dale Tomich, Robert Miles, Capitalism and unfree labour: anomaly or necessity? London. New York: Tavistock Publications. 1987. 250 pp. -Robert Forster, Mederic-Louis-Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery, A civilization that perished: the last years of white colonial rule in Haiti. Translated, abridged and edited by Ivor D. Spencer. Lanham, New York, London: University Press of America, 1985. xviii + 295 pp. -Carolyn E. Fick, Robert Louis Stein, Léger Félicité Sonthonax: the lost sentinel of the Republic. Rutherford, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1985. 234 pp. In: New West Indian Guide/ Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 62 (1988), no: 3/4, Leiden, 165-209 This PDF-file was downloaded from http://www.kitlv-journals.nl Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access BOOK REVIEWS Peasants and capital: Dominica in the world economy. MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Johns Hopkins Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, 1988. xiv + 344 pp. (Cloth US$ 35.00) Read one way, this book is a contribution to theory, a reflection on peasant labor processes within capitalist processes of accumulation. Read another way, it is one of the very few available accounts of Dominican history and society. Read another way, it is an ethnography of the village of Wesley Ville la Soye, a banana producing village on Dominica's northeast coast. Read yet another way, the book offers an account of the relationships between Dominican banana producers and the British firm of Geest Holdings Ltd., outlining the manner in which Geest controls trade and documenting the process of capital accumulation at Geest at the expense of Windward producers. What makes Trouillot's book unique and suc- cessful is its careful and thorough integration of each of these levels. Trouillot has set out to write an ethnography in the world system, one that could simultaneously illuminate processes at the center and in a peripheral village. Aside from a theoretical introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into three major sections: The Nation, The World and The Village. After a brief description and survey of the island, the bulk of the first section is devoted to an historical sketch, which is constructed around two guiding themes - the history of the export economy and the evolution of the island's labor force. The first, presented in chapter 3, is a story of a succession of export commodities, each of which has enjoyed a period of dominance during the past two centuries - coffee, sugar, cocoa, limes and bananas. Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access 166 BOOK REVIEWS At the conclusion to this chapter Trouillot suggests that this history can be written in spatial terms - the coast (sugar and limes) versus the interior (coffee, cocoa, vanilla and, later, bananas) - which simultaneously repre- sents an opposition (struggle) between large estates and peasants. The next three chapters build upon this insight in impressive fashion, outlining the evolution of a peasant labor process, from the plantation economy and the slaves' provision grounds, through squatting on estate and open lands after abolition and the move toward the interior, to struggles with estates and the state over access and rights to land, and so on. We end the first section with a fïrm sense of the small scale banana producer in Dominica as historical product and historical actor. In the short section on The World, Trouillot moves to the present and recent past, presenting an economie and social analysis of the relationships among local banana producers, the Dominican Banana Growers Asso- ciation (DBGA), the Windward Islands Banana Association (WINBAN), and Geest Holdings in London. From his examination of agreements between DBGA, WINBAN and Geest, through his analysis of the un- favorable position of DBGA and especially the small producers in a buying scheme that places all risks on the producers, to his examination of the history and available accounts of the Geest group, Trouillot moves his analysis to a level not often encountered in ethnographies of the sort. He does not simply assert that small producers are caught in a wider set of structures or that their poverty is a function of Geest's capital accumulation; he demonstrates it. His discussion of banana contracts, the process by which DBGA selects and rejects bananas, and the social situation of banana producers who own land and seem to control production but fïnd that the most fundamental decisions concerning their livelihood rest elsewhere is at once empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated. Given the structure of the book, the ethnographer does not allow us to arrive in his village until we are two thirds of the way through the book. Once we arrive, Trouillot pro vides us with an historical sketch that places the village within the larger history presented in the first section, a description of the village and of local conceptions of space that leads directly into an account of banana production and marketing as seen by the producers themselves (walking to the garden, rushing to cut sterns and get them to Londonderry on a hastily announced market day, standing in line at the DBGA depot in Londonderry, etc), and an analysis of the fundamental social groups within the village. Trouillot concludes with an examination of recent social trends in Wesley and Dominica, trends which have produced a generation of "banana children" who have been schooled outside the village, whose visions take them off the farm, whose aspirations Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:55:42AM via free access REVIEWS 167 include the civil service or emigration, but whose possibilities are somewhat more limited. In most ways that matter, this book is a success. It offers such an impressive integration of theory and history, of macro- and micro-levels of analysis, that it should serve as a model and Standard for future studies in anthropological political economy. It does, quite well, what many anthropologists have been saying we should be doing. The theoretical discussion of peasant labor processes in chapter 1 is insightful and should carry the ongoing discussion of peasants and capitalism to a new level. The historical sketch in part I is a successful example of how one can write a history that pays simultaneous attention to structural transformation and to the agency of working people. And the examination of Geest in Part II makes an analysis of actions and processes at the metropolitan core central to Trouillot's account of the social dynamics of a peripheral village. This reviewer has but two areas of disquiet, both of which are minor. First, given Trouillot's interest in theory, he generally begins, both in the book as a whole and in several chapters, with a theoretical discussion that leads to and provides a rationale for history and ethnography. But the true justification for the importance of the history and ethnography is to be found in the quality of the accounts themselves, the value of which Trouillot seems to discount, ironically enough, in his theoretical introductions. Second, given the book's importance as a model and Standard, it should have included a statement of the author's methods and strategies for linking village ethnography with archival research in Dominica and London.