Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904. By Alan H. Adamson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pp. 315. $12.50
Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904. By Alan H. Adamson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Pp. 315. $12.50
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《没有奴隶的糖：英属圭亚那的政治经济学，1838-1904 年》，艾伦·H·亚当森 (Alan H. Adamson) 和伦敦：耶鲁大学出版社，第 12.50 页。
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发表时间：
1973
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通讯作者：
J. Mandle
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作者：
J. Mandle
在这本书中，艾伦·H·亚当森巧妙地使用了英国殖民局的记录来重建19世纪圭亚那社会的轮廓。从1838年奴隶解放造成的人力危机开始，亚当森首先研究了契约移民如何为种植园农业提供了必要的新劳动力供应，然后继续提供了关于这一时期圭亚那三种不同但相关的生活模式的冗长而有充分记录的讨论：村民、种植园劳动者和种植园主的生活模式。他的主要主题在整本书中都有提及，但在最后两章中得到了最明确的阐述，一方面是这一时期圭亚那种植园霸权的政治和帝国起源，另一方面是这种主导地位对发展的影响。然而，我的印象是，尤其是对本刊的读者来说，亚当森在上述第一点上比在第二点上更有说服力。这在一定程度上是因为亚当森不是经济学家，只是很少使用经济理论来分析经济表现。然而，同样重要的是，他没有把圭亚那放在其他新世界种植园经济体的背景下。因此，种植园农业被强调--我认为是正确的--是圭亚那经历的发展相对失败的根源，但无论是通过使用理论还是通过将该国与其他类似社会进行比较，都没有明确说明阻碍发展的机制。事实上，圭亚那只是从美国南部，经过加勒比海和圭亚那延伸到巴西东北部的广阔地理区域的一部分，那里的种植园不仅在经济上占主导地位，而且对更广泛的社会制度和随之而来的经济变化模式也具有决定性的影响。一般来说，这些协会是在17世纪或18世纪建立的，作为不断扩大的欧洲经济的前哨，以便向大都市市场供应商品，这些商品通常由于气候原因在国内无法生产足够的数量来满足市场需求。然而，当时的技术决定了这种生产必须在劳动密集型的基础上进行。因此，在新世界劳动力稀缺的情况下，强制性的非市场劳动力动员和分配方法对于以合理成本进行大规模生产至关重要。当然，经典的机制是奴隶制，但种植园经济即使在·废除奴隶制之后仍在继续，采用其他非市场的劳动力提供方法，如圭亚那那样的契约移民，或在圭亚那使用佃农安排。
In this book Alan H. Adamson has brilliantly used British Colonial Office records to reconstruct the outlines of nineteenth-century Guyanese society. Starting with the manpower crisis caused by slave emancipation in 1838, Adamson examines first the way in which indentured immigration provided the new labor supply necessary for plantation agriculture and then goes on to provide lengthy and well-documented discussions of the three different but related patterns of life in Guyana in this period: that of the villager, the plantation laborer and the planters. His major themes, referred to throughout the book but developed most explicitly in two concluding chapters, are the political and imperial origins of the plantation hegemony in Guyana in this period on the one hand and the development-retarding implications of that dominance on the other. My impression, however, is that particularly for readers of this Journal, Adamson will be rather more convincing on the first rather than the second of these points. Partially this is due to the fact that Adamson is not an economist and only infrequently makes use of economic theory in analyzing the performance of the economy. Equally important, however, is the fact that he does not place Guyana in the context of other New World plantation economies. As a result, plantation agriculture is stressed— correctly I think—as the source of the relative failure of development experienced in Guyana, but the mechanisms by which development was retarded are not made clear either through the use of theory or by comparing the country with other similar societies. In fact, Guyana was only one part of a wider geographic expanse extending from the U.S. South, through the Caribbean and the Guianas into the Northeast of Brazil where plantations were not only economically dominant but also decisively influential for a wider set of social institutions and for the consequent pattern of economic change. Generally these societies were established in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries as outposts of expanding European economies in order to supply the metropolitan markets with commodities which, usually for climatic reasons, could not be produced in adequate volume at home to satisfy the market demand. Prevailing technology, however, dictated that such production be carried out on a labor intensive basis. As a result, in the labor-scarce circumstances of the New World, coercive non-market methods of labor mobilization and allocation were essential for carrying out large-scale production at reasonable costs. The classic mechanism was, of course, slavery, but plantation economies continued even after the • abolition of slavery by employing other non-market methods of supplying labor, such as indentured immigration as in Guyana, or the use of sharecropping arrangements in the