DialecticalAnthropology 1(1975) 7 1 - 7 9
© Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands
CLASS, CULTURE, AND HISTORICAL PROCESS
Eugene Genovese
Caribbean Transformations* brin_gs together
Sidney W. Mintz's most important studies of
the Afro-American experience and of such
related subjects as the development of the
plantation system, the emergence o f post-
emancipation peasantries, and the social basis
of nationhood. 1 Anthropologists and other
Caribbean specialists, who have long appre-
ciated the high quality of Mintz's field work,
research, and analytical performance, will
welcome a volume that conveniently presents
these previously published papers together
with much new material. They should take
additional satisfaction in Mintz's decision to
revise his earlier work so as to shape these
papers into a coherent interpretation o f
Caribbean social history. Even those who know
Mintz's work well will find this book fresh.
To Mintz's great credit, Caribbean Trans-
formations deserves careful criticism from a
wide range of perspectives, for it makes im-
portant contributions to cultural and econom-
ic anthropology, to the political and economic
history of the Caribbean, to the development
of a social history of oppressed classes, to an
understanding of the roots of racism, and to
the theory of capitalist development. Con-
sideration o f these contributions, especially
to anthropology and Caribbean studies, may
*Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago:
Aldine~Atherton, Inc., 1974).
Eugene Genovese is Chairman of the Depaxtment of History at
the University of Rochester, New York.
best be left to specialists. As a historian with
no claims to being a Caribbean specialist, I
wish to limit myself to some of the implica-
tions for the Marxist interpretation of history
- an interpretation that has clearly influenced
Mintz's thought and helped shape his formula-
tion of major problems.
Taken as a whole, Caribbean Transformations
does much more than explore the origins and
development of Afro-Caribbean culture; it
provides an original vantage point for the
study of Caribbean political economy and of
the problems facing those who would lead these
or other new nations out of poverty, disunity,
and colonial e x p l o i t a t i o n ) As such, it should
provide all the answers anyone needs to refute
those who pursue the cult of "relevance."
What could be less relevant than to dally over
the different ways in which Caribbean peoples
cook their food or organize their yards and
gardens? Yet, as Mintz demonstrates, the
problem is not that cooking has no relevance
for politics - we have good reason to know
that it does - but that we cannot as yet
establish the chains o f connection within the
patterns we are struggling to identify.
The way a people cooks its food and the
kinds of food it cooks reveal a good deal about
its spirit and - to invoke the word that con-
jures up vast mystical properties these days -
its "consciousness." F o r example, slaves in the
United States had ostensibly been whipped
into sulleness, dispiritedness, and even infan-
tilization; yet we know that they took great
72
pride in their cooking. They carefully handed
down recipes from mother (and father) to
daughter (and son) and quietly assumed that
blacks were naturally superior to whites in
culinary matters, and indeed in much else.
Cooking, like many other seemingly trivial
activities, became a politically safe way for a
downtrodden people to remind themselves
and others with eyes to see that, however
badly mauled, they were keeping themselves
alive to fight another day.
Among American scholars, no one has dis-
played a deeper sense than Mintz of the polit-
ical implications of an oppressed people's
culture. From a general appreciation of cul-
tural manifestations as proto-politics - as
"resistance" - he has carried his analyses to
higher levels in order to establish the most
specific linkages he can discern, consistent
with responsible scholarship. He has delineated
those linkages he regards as almost certain,
those he regards as probable, and those he
regards as merely possible. Thereby he has
established the foundation for further work
that may, as he well knows, overturn some of
his favorite hypotheses. He has forcefully
demonstrated that the history, economy, and
politics of the Caribbean - not to mention
the prospects for revolutionary social and
national transformation - cannot intelligently
be pursued outside a cultural context.
For Mintz, culture is ever changing. In one
of its decisive aspects, it serves oppressed
people as a strategy for survival through the
organization of daily life. As such, it is pro-
foundly political, for it provides the essential
context, both material and spiritual, from
which a people forges its politics, strictly
defined. Or, as Mintz eloquently puts it:
It seems to me immensely important to maintain an
insistence on the sociopolitical significance of everyday
life - whether we analyze contemporary black power
movements, slave revolts, or the growth of a nation.
Throughout history, the massive struggles of whole
peoples to discover and claim their own destiny has been
waged against a background in which love, hate, personal
loyalty, the rewards of propinquity and familiarity, and
the ordinary pleasures of existence continue to make
irrevocable claims upon the human spirit, The peoples
of the Caribbean, predominantly poor, rural, agricultural,
and illiterate, have been as subject to these claims as any
other peoples in world history. Crops must be planted,
cultivated, and harvested; babies must be conceived and
born; young people must fall in love; old people must be
cared for. The animal and spiritual needs of all human
beings demand satisfaction, no matter what the con-
vulsions of history (p. 32).
The central idea of slavery, from the masters'
point of view, was the absolute submission of
the slave to the master. Theoretically, the slave
represented no more than an extension of the
master's will. Stanley Elkins, in his contro-
versial book, Slavery: A Problem in American
Institutional and Intellectual Life, charted the
logic, although by no means the historical
reality, of this system? But human beings,
including slaves, do not so readily collapse
into mindless puppets of the logical processes
invented by their rulers. Theory or no theory,
law or no law, whip or no whip, the slaves
manifested wills of their own, and every
manifestation of those wills, no matter how
trivial to outsiders, constituted resistance to
the system, for it imposed limits on the power
of the masters within a system of ostensibly
unlimited power. Mintz shows, among other
things, that each specific response by slaves
and groups of slaves to the system o f control
imposed upon them must be studied in its
particularity - that an understanding of the
worlds the slaves made for themselves must
rest on a dissection of the discrete ways in
which particular slaves at particular historical
moments combined the legacy of their "em-
battled" past with the emergent demands of
their painful present,
Mintz tells us that he is merely trying to
etch in the background against which great
historical events have occurred and will occur.
This claim is too modest. When, for example,
he explores the origins and nature o f the
African elements in Caribbean life, he demon-
strates the limits within which all modern
ideologies - Pan-Africanism, nationalism,
Marxism - must operate if they expect to

sink deep roots in these heterogeneous societies.
In particular, Mintz carefully lays out the ways
in which the Caribbean peoples, including the
blacks, have had a variety of historical experi-
ences within which differences match similar-
ities in importance.
These considerations lead Mintz to confront
the vexing question o f the relationship o f class,
race, and nationality, not in terms of the
balance among these elements but in the way
in which class shapes culture and vice versa,
and the way in which each separately, and
both as an organic whole, shape the struggle
for national identity. His examination of
historical orgins, of types of metropolitan-
colonial relationships, and of plantation
economic systems all form necessary parts of
a search for a coherent theory of the relation-
ship of class, culture, and nation.
Mintz's papers on Puerto Rico and Jamaica,
for example, make bold new departures that
have already yielded results in the work of
other scholars, some of whom occasionally
even acknowledge his influence. By tracing
the stages in the development of a plantation
during and after slavery, Mintz in effect offers
a better model than we have had for the study
of New World plantation systems. Its special
value lies in the links it helps establish between
those plantations based on slave labor and those
based on wage labor and various forms of dis-
guised bondage. Whereas most other efforts
to define and examine the continuities and
discontinuities have focused on economic
organization - sometimes with excellent
results - Mintz sets the economic organization
itself in a broader social framework.
Mintz treats us to a careful, empirically
grounded analysis of the stages in the develop-
ment of the plantation system at the unit level.
Other scholars, especially historians and
sociologists, have followed this procedure
before, but it is done here, probably for the
first time, from a theoretically integrative
anthropological point of view. The material
basis (land, labor, techniques of production,
73
etc.) receives careful attention, as do the
limits it places upon human action. But that
human action never appears in these pages as
something passive or receptive - as mere ob-
ject or superstructural reflex. On the contrary,
minute details of social life and culture appear
with a new power because Mintz demonstrates
the ways in which they in fact do mold and
ultimately inform the material basis o f pro-
duction. Nothing is irrelevant. The ways in
which slaves, and later freedmen, cooked their
food, reinterpreted received religious doctrines,
organized a division of labor in the home, sang
songs, worked hard or shirked - the ways, big
and small, they shaped their own lives -
provided them with reference points o f their
own. These reference points had strong African
antecedents, but also drew on Europe, the
colonial setting, and above all on the immediate
plantation community. The slaves ruthlessly
appropriated to themselves everything they
needed and could use. The world view they
fashioned in consequence allowed them to
meet the demands o f the economic and social
system without fully becoming its creatures.
That the system took a heavy toll, culturally
as well as physically, is beyond doubt. But it
could not produce the robots it wanted. The
struggle of the masters to impose their will, of
the slaves to resist it, and o f the compromises
and antagonistic unity that resulted cannot be
understood without a detailed, specific study
of the cultural mechanisms of everyday life.
This kind of study lies at the heart o f Mintz's
work.
The masters provided the material conditions
of production, which shaped what they them-
selves were to become. Together, as a ruling
class o f men who presided over a regime of
"things," they sought to make their laborers
an extension of their own will. But, as Mintz
convincingly demonstrates, the slaves and
peasants created lives for themselves even with-
in the narrow limits set by the regime. They
stretched and ultimately broke through those
limits, not so much by waging frontal warfare
74
- although they did their share o f that - as by
making themselves into human beings and
building a collective community life upon their
own self-created humanity. Their effort changed,
for better or for worse, both the masters and
the machines; the oppressed and the oppressors
together defined the regime as a whole and
simultaneously shaped each other.
Mintz does not, however, leave matters there,
as is the fashion among those social scientists
and social historians who invoke the cultural
creativity of the lower classes either to minimize
their misery and the force of oppression or,
alternatively and from the "left," to escape
having to discuss the price every people must
pay for channeling its creativity into a cultural
response to exploitation, oppression, and terror.
Mintz faces these painful questions and relates
the admirable cultural achievements of the
slaves and peasants to long-term political weak-
nesses. In the Caribbean these questions o f class
and culture loom large in a consideration of the
new problems of nationalism. Mintz reveals the
terrible price paid by each society as a whole
for the racial and class biases that prevented
the planters and the metropolitan elites from
recognizing how much the slaves and peasants
had in fact built both for themselves and for
the island nations now struggling to emerge.
If Mintz seems cautious about attributing
a central role in social change to class forces,
the logic o f his interpretation of culture carries
the argument onto essentially Marxian ground.
And no Marxism that fails to take his ideas
seriously is likely to be worth much. His inter-
pretation of historical process is, however,
marred by ambiguity and a dubious theory of
capitalist development.
Mintz repeatedly obscures the distinction
between the capitalist mode of production and
capitalistic elements in other modes of pro-
duction. He does not, for example, clarify
matters when he writes: "The African slave
trade and slavery itself were ultimately bound
up with the spread of European military and
colonial power and with commercial develop-
merits, especially in overseas capitalistic agri-
culture." (p. 9) Or when, despite his appeal
to Marxian categories, he suddenly shifts to
antithetical ground and implicitly seeks the
mainspring of historical development in sys-
tems of exchange rather than systems of pro-
duction by contrasting capitalism with "isolated
manors" (p. 47). 4 Or when he writes: "The
establishment of the plantation system meant
a rooted overseas capitalism based on conquest,
slavery and coercion, and investment and entre-
p r e n e u r s h i p . . . Thus, the growth of slave-based
economies in the New World was an integral
part of the rise of European commerce and
i n d u s t r y . . . " (pp. 9 - 1 0 ) . Or when he slides
over major problems o f interpretation: "Hence
the development of slave systems outside
Europe was important to European develop-
ment; the slave economies were in fact depen-
dent parts of European e c o n o m i e s . . . " (p. 10).
Every statement in these passages is individually
defensible. But neither individually nor to-
gether do they address the main theoretical
question they are meant to address. And
nowhere does Mintz hedge more outrageously
- the more so since he rarely hedges at all -
as when he alludes to unnamed and
probably nonexistent opponents: "The curious
view that slavery and capitalism are mutually
exclusive still persists" (p. 47). If that view -
not so much curious as manifestly stupid -
does indeed exist, we ought to be told where
and by whom.
Marx cogently analyzed the ways in which
capitalism, from the moment of its birth in
Europe, fed upon prior social systems, and in
our day we haye seen innumerable instances
of advanced capitalist countries deliberately
frustrating incipient bourgeois-nationalist
movements in underdeveloped countries so as
to exploit resources under the de jure control
of essentially seigneurial rulers. But this process
has always been contradictory, as Lenin
brilliantly perceived in his celebrated critique
of imperialism. The relationship between
metropolis and colony has generally been

propelled by the contradiction between pre-
capitalist propertied classes in the colonies,
and the bourgeoisies ruling the metropolis and
therefore indirectly ruling the colonies as well.
Mintz presents an essentially sound inter-
pretation of the Caribbean slave regimes as
mere appendages of European capitalism. The
problems arise when he extrapolates from the
Caribbean case, or set of cases, and speaks
broadly of European expansion and the colo-
nization of the entire New World. His argument
would be unobjectionable for the Caribbean if
he were to qualify his analysis of Saint-Domingue
to account for the profound cleavage between
the France of Nantes and Bordeaux on the one
hand and that of the interior on the other; 5
and if he would more sharply say what his
historical reconstruction in fact demonstrates
about the Spanish Caribbean - that early
colonization reflected essentially seigneurial
forces and that only later, With the sugar boom
and foreign penetration, was Cuban slavery
transformed along the bourgeois lines long
dominant in the Anglo-Dutch Caribbean.
I should not dwell on these matters of
qualification and tangential refinement were
it not that Mintz's interpretation can and
undoubtedly will be used to support the
dubious (and fundamentally anti-Marxist)
theory of historical development propounded
thoughtfully by Paul Sweezy and recently
developed with erudition and considerable
intellectual acuteness by Immanuel Waller-
stein. 6
Mintz insists that slavery, the plantation
systems, and indeed colonial exploitation as
a whole represented the outward thrust of a
rising European capitalism. Despite the attempts
of Sweezy, Frank, and others to give this argu-
ment a Marxian cast, it soon proves incompat-
ible with a Marxian interpretation of historical
process, which necessarily stresses class relations
of production rather than changes in the market
and exchange relations - a distinction ham-
mered at by Marx and defended skillfully by
Maurice Dobb, H.K. Takahashi, and others.
75
The road Mintz has chosen leads quickly
enough either to Werner Sombart's idealism
or to the mechanistic economic interpretations
of a Pirenne (on whom Sweezy relied) or a
Braudel (on whom Wallerstein now relies).
Mintz implicitly takes his stand with Pirenne
and Braudel, who at least offer plausible alter-
natives and appeal to historical evidence. But
Mintz, like those great French bourgeois
historians whom he does not directly cite, en-
counters Sombart's difficulty anyway. Thus
we learn of the "contradictions" in Spanish
expansion, at the heart of which lay the lack
of a suitable private bourgeois sector (p. 255).
Mintz spares us Sombart's solution, according
to which a bourgeois spirit miraculously ap-
peared in Spain in the fourteenth century, just
in time to found an empire, and then mirac-
ulously disappeared, just in time to account
for the subsequent failure of Spain to create
anything remotely like a capitalist society. ~
Indeed, Mintz wisely falls silent.
Having criticized this viewpoint elsewhere, 8
I here shall restrict myself to one preliminary
observation and then proceed to indicate the
ways in which Mintz's work, despite this
theoretical aberration, actually reinforces and
promises to enrich a Marxist interpretation.
The preliminary observation concerns the
nature of the much-debated "general crisis of
the seventeenth century," which was general
precisely in affecting the society as a whole
and which therefore is most usefully envisaged
as a crisis of the seigneurial social order. The
capitalist sector suffered a specifically economic
crisis, which Eric J. Hobsbawm has skillfully
outlined, but this crisis of Europe's advanced
sectors was analytically distinct from, although
historically enmeshed with, the general social
crisis; in itself it was general only in Hobsbawm's
restricted sense of being international. 9 Were
Mintz to relate his historical account to these
wider developments, he might not be so ready
to assimilate the whole of the Afro-Caribbean
experience to the bourgeois aspect o f a historical
process marked by declining as well as rising
social classes and systems.
76
Mintz!s wobbling into a fundamentally anti-
Marxian view of capitalist development as a
projection of commercial expansion is the
more unfortunate since it proceeds on a level
of abstraction divorced from the splendid con-
tent of his empirical studies and his rich forays
into anthropological theory. Thus, he pains-
takingly and sensitively explores archaic social
forms in their historical settings and in reference
to their political implications. In so doing, he
significantly sharpens the theory of social
classes, which, while at the heart o f the Marxian
interpretation of history, is in the process of
becoming a blunt tool of analysis.
The possibilities inherent in Mintz's work
emerge most clearly from a critique o f its more
mechanistic portions. For if strong dissent
from some of his favorite propositions is in
order, so is warm appreciation for his reorien-
tation of the discussion. Specifically and brief-
ly, we may consider the social implications of
his view o f the plantation as a quasi-industrial
enterprise and o f his view of the relationship
between slave accommodation and resistance.
It is one thing for Mintz to chide scholars
for slighting the quasi-industrial nature o f the
plantation system; it is another for him to
slight in turn what he calls the ~deceptively
rural, agrarian, pseudo-manorial" quality of
slave-based plantation production. To no small
extent the quarrel concerns specificity. Mintz
focuses on the great sugar plantations of the
Caribbean, with their heavy capitalization of
land, labor, and machinery, their considerable
reliance on industrial processing, their large
numbers of slaves, and their frequent control
by absentee businessmen. But surely the cot-
ton and tobacco plantations and farms of the
United States, with their minimal capitalization
of anything except labor - a gin only cost
$125 - their limited processing facilities, their
small slave force, and their resident planters,
must introduce heavy qualifications.
Questions arise even for the sugar plantations
of the Caribbean, not to mention those of
Brazil. Mintz no doubt has made a valuable
contribution by his demonstration of the man-
ner in which the plantation system broke the
African agriculturalist into a regime approach-
ing industrial discipline. However cruel and
costly - and Mintz does not hide his indigna-
tion - these hideous regimes did prepare
millions of people to cope with some features
of the technology and economic organization
of the modern world. And yet, what was the
result? Once emancipated, they turned their
backs on much of the role to which they had
been assigned and, in Mintz's splendid term,
~reconstituted" themselves as peasantries.
Mintz also shows, in one of his most piercing
insights, that they had prepared themselves
for this reconstruction by their own efforts
within the slave system itself. The paradox
implicit in Mintz's analysis reflects the contra-
dictory nature of the plantation reality he is
describing.
As a case in point, consider slave attitudes
toward work and time. The plantation produced
for a world market and required an appropriate
level of output and economic rationality.
Therefore, the views of work and time that
the masters tried to impose on their slaves
were typically bourgeois: work as a matter of
duty, time as a matter of money. But for ob-
vious reasons there was no way they could
successfully impose such values, and the
historical evidence from every slave society
shows that in fact they failed. Mintz reminds
us that the familiar charge of "laziness" against
the slaves must be balanced against the un-
deniable fact that they did the work necessary
to produce the surplus off which their detrac-
tors lived. But they worked according to a
rhythm of their own, alternating great bursts
of energy and enthusiasm with periods of
exasperating slackness and indifference. Like
other preindustrial workers and peasants, they
demanded and got concessions to their own
sense of time, which eschewed the regularity
of clock-time for natural rhythms based on
daylight, season, and religious beliefs. In the
end, the planters made no more concessions

than were compatible with a satisfactory level
of performance and profit, but these were
enough to underscore the importance of the
rural and fundamentally preindustrial quality
of the system, l° As a result, the blacks came
out of slavery, in different degrees in different
countries, having been disciplined to certain
features of modern economic life but simul-
taneously having had their decidedly pre-
modern patterns of work, time, and leisure
disastrously reinforced. The political implica-
tions o f this ambiguous legacy remain to be
explored.
These or other quarrels only emphasize
Mintz's greatest achievement, which is, in my
opinion, his contribution to a theory of social
change - of historical process. If, as my own
reading of his work suggests, he supports
Marx's insistence on the centrality of social
classes, he also confronts the problem of the
nature of these classes in a new way. Marxist
historiography has always been plagued by
the crudeness of its definition o f class. A t first
glance, life is simple enough: classes are defined
as the relationship of groups to the means of
production. Taken straight, the recurrent
problem of "class consciousness" has no
meaning apart from requMng theories to ex-
plain "false consciousness." Happily, the
exigencies of politics have forced Marxists, as
well as non-Marxists, to resist settling for this
first glance, if only because it soon exposes
itself as almost useless. One way to confront
the problem is to retreat into subjectivism,
and we have recently been treated to a rash of
theories according to which a class only be-
comes a class when it achieves class conscious-
ness - a point of view that nicely disposes of
virtually all peasantries, and most other socio-
economic classes for that matter. It is, after
all, not helpful to declare that: (a) all workers
in all countries belong to one class; (b) this
international class is exploited by an inter-
national bourgeoisie against which it should
unite; and (c) in event of war the class should
turn its guns against its particular bourgeoisie -
77
and then to howl with rage when workers
assert national loyalties. On the surface, we
confront a classic case of "false consciousness":
the workers do not yet perceive their own true
interests. But a bit below the surface we begin
to notice a strange phenomenon. Often these
very workers believe that their class loyalties
dictate support for their nation and that they
are bound by ties of interest as well as senti-
ment more firmly to their "own" bourgeoisie
than to workers of another country. In effect,
they often define their own class - quite
class-consciously - to be a class within a wider
national community rather than within some
abstraction known as The World. n
Much more than culture accounts for these
and other historical blocs. Economic interest,
for example, carries its own weight. Indeed,
Mintz's suggestion that imperialism must be
understood as intrinsic to capitalism - as pre-
figured in its origins - and not as a separate
stage of economic development, reminds us of
how little we yet know about the historical
roots of the political and ideological links
among the classes of metropolitan Europe in
relation to the colonial peoples. But it is no
less clear that a common culture has provided
a powerful - perhaps the most powerful - tie
between the rulers and the ruled within modern
nation-states.
The obvious is, as usual, not so obvious.
There are, after all, profound differences be-
tween the culture of Brooklyn dock workers
and that of Wall Street bankers; t h e r e m a y be
even greater differences between the culture
of Jamaican peasants and that of the Kingston
elite. Yet ruling classes, when they are not in
their death throes and relying on naked force,
rule by mediating these differences within the
context of a hegemonic ideology - "hegemonic"
because it compels the lower classes to define
themselves within the rul)ng system even while
resisting its aggression with enormous courage
and resourcefulness. The main difficulty with
Mintz's brilliant work on the relationship of
class and culture lies in his skirting of the
problem of hegemony.
78
This difficulty appears most clearly in the
midst of one of his finest analytical performances.
He writes effectively about the complexities of
accommodation and resistance and rebuts the
rigid mechanistic formulations that have marked
the recent debate on the "slave personality."
Yet his excellent discussion contains a certain
mechanistic quality of its own:
But there was also accommodation, submission, degrada-
tion, and serf-hatred. Moreover, it is clear that some of
the most effective forms of resistance were built upon
prior adaptation, involving the slaves in processes of
culture change and retention of a complicated kind. To
write off all adaptive mechanisms as a loss of will to resist
is tantamount to the denial of creative energies to the
slaves themselves. . . . Was the readiness of Jamaican slaves
to grow their own foodstuffs on plantation uplands to be
written off as "nonresistance"? Through such activities,
the slaves acquired skills in cultivation and marketing that
greatly increased thek ability to escape plantation labo~
after emancipation; traveled freely to the masket-places,
where they learned much of value (some of which may
have been essential in fomenting rebellion.); demonstrated
to observant visitors their capacity to function indepen-
dently and intelligently; and acquired liquid capital for
various purposes. Yet no one would call subsistance
cultivation and marketing mechanisms of "resistance,"
for the very good reason that they were not resistance as
such, but forms of accommodation. At the same time,
suicide - since it deprived masters of their labor -
is correctly labeled "resistance," even though, once dead,
one does precious little resisting (p. 76).
The brittle dichotomy Mintz poses between
accommodation and resistance does violence
to the dialectical character of the specific
analysis. For example, he avoids any such
brittleness in his remarkable analysis of
"Caribbean Peasantries as a Social Science
Problem." There he writes of the post-eman-
cipation period: "The creation of peasantries
was simultaneously an act of Westernization
and an act of resistance" (p. 155). His previous
reliance on the time-honored divorce of
accommodation from mechanisms of resistance
dissolves when he addresses such specifics; then
he treats us to more subtle and accurate descrip-
tions of a single dialectical process.
The difficulty stems from Mintz's attempt
to bypass the problems posed by the ideological
character o f the slave regime considered as a
whole. Certainly, these problems, especially
for the Caribbean, present enormous complex-
ities and frustrations. I have argued elsewhere
that accommodation and resistance in the
southern United States constituted comple-
mentary and organically connected slave
responses to an imposed paternalism that ex-
pressed the essence of a hegemonic slave-
holders' ideology.~2 But this interpretation,
even if it proves correct, cannot simply be
extended to the Caribbean, for the social
nature of the slave regime there differed
radically from that in the Old Southl We may
therefore readily appreciate the greater diffi-
culty posed for those who try to bring coher-
ence to the Caribbean experience. But, as the
best portions of Mintz's essays show, he is
working toward a formulation that transcends
the superficial bifurcation of resistance and
accommodation. In no other way can Mintz's
judgment on black culture realize its full
potential: "To survive at all under slavery was
a mode of resistance; the cultures o f contem-
porary Caribbean peoples are in their entirety
a testament to such resistance" (p. 229).
The significance of Mintz's cultural explora-
tions, and not merely of his direct discussions
o f nationhood, therefore extend forward as
well as backward in time. ~3 His efforts do not,
as he warns his readers, end with a disentangling
of the threads that bind class and nation, but
they do bring us closer to that desired result.
His careful dissection of specific peasantries
reveals, first, their ethnic conditioning, and
second, the way in which the emergent,
ethnically conditioned peasantries have in turn
shaped the struggle for nationality. This point
of view and the evidence on which it rests
strengthen, in my judgment, the argument for
the centrality of social classes in historical
process, but they do so in a fresh and signifi-
cant way for those who would study the past
and present so as better to shape the future.

NOTES
1 The book is divided into an Introduction ("Afro-
Caribbeana") and three parts. Part I ("Forced Labor and
the Plantation System") contains three essays: "Slavery
and the Afro-American World"; "Slavery and Forced
Labor in Puerto Rico"; and "The History of a Puerto Rican
Plantation." Part II ("Caribbean Peasantries") contains
five essays: "The Origin o f Reconstituted Peasantries";
"The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages"; "The
Origins of the Jamaican Market System"; "The Contem-
porary Jamaican Market System"; and "Houses and Yards
among Caribbean Peasantries." Part III ("Caribbean
Nationhood") contains two essays: "The Case of Haiti,"
and "Caribbean Nationhood: An Anthropological
Perspective."
2 Among Mintz's many contributions that cannot be dis-
cussed in this review-essay is an arresting analysis of the
differences between the emerging nations of the Caribbean
and other so-called Third World nations. Mintz's inter-
pretation reinforces the deep suspicion that the formula-
tion "Third World" is at best analytically useless and at
worst a political swindle. And just what are those other
"two worlds" anyway?
3 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American
Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Ann J.
Lane, ed., The Debate Over Slavery: Stanley Elkins and
His Critics (Urbana, IlL, 1971).
4 Mintz repeatedly comes close to identifying the seigneurlal
(or "feudal") mode of production with manorial isolation
and self-sufficiency. Nowhere does he confront the Marxian
objections to this identification, as best argued in Maurice
Dobb's seminal Studies in the Development o f Capitalism
(New York, 1947). This deficiency leads Mintz straight
to his dubious identification of capitalism with the spread
of commercial capital.
5 See, e.g., the suggestive analysis in Edward Whiting Fox,
History in Geographic Perspective: The Other France
(New York, 1971).
6 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern WorM-System:
Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins o f the European
World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York,
1974). This book deserves a full critique in its own right,
which must await another time and place. Its argument,
79
however, is prefigured in Sweezy's attack on Dobb and
in Frank's position. See Maurice Dobb, ed., The Transition
from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York, 1955), which
includes Sweezy's critique, a reply by Dobb, and contri-
butions by a number of noted Marxist scholars. See
especially H.K. Takahashi's attack on Sweezy's position.
7 Werner Sombart, The Quintessence o f Capitalism: A Stud),
o f the History and Psychology o f the Modern Business
Man (New York, 1967), esp. pp. 134--136. Sombart's
viewpoint has caused a good deal of mischief in Luso-
Brazilian studies. See, e.g., Bento Carqueja, O Capitalismo
moderno e as suas origens em Portugal (Oporto, 1908)
and especially, Roberto C. Simonsen, Hist6ria econ~mica
do Brasil, 1500-1820 (2 vols.; S~o Paulo, 1937). But see
the critique b y the Marxist, Sergio Bagti, Economla de la
sociedctd colonial." Ensayo de la hist6ria eomparada de
Am&lea Latina (Buenos Aires, t949), p. 54.
8 Eugene D. Genovese, The Worm the Slaveholders Made:
Two Essays in Interpretation (New York, 1969), part one.
9 E.J. Hobsbawm, "The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,"
in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660 (New
York, 1967), pp. 5 - 6 2 .
10 For an elaboration see my Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World
the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), book two, part two.
I am afraid that Mintz's viewpoint inadvertently leads
toward that of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman,
whose Time on the Cross: The Economics o f American
Negro Slavery (2 vols.; Boston, 1974), manages to trans-
form the slaves into puritanized Afro-Saxons with a
bourgeois work ethic that would have made Benjamin
Franklin green with envy.
11 For an elaboration of these remarks and an alternative to
a reliance on doctrines of "false consciousness," see my
"Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders' Democracy,"
Agricultural History (forthcoming).
12 Again, I cannot pursue the matter here, but those who
wish an elaboration may consult Roll, Jordan, Roll, the
whole of which is devoted to this argument.
13 Mintz's treatment o f nationalism and regionalism raises
many questions, including the problem of the class nature
of the state. On these matters, too, he has much to say
and much to contribute to the development of Marxian
thought. But these matters, like so many others suggested
in this rich book, will have to be pursued elsewhere.