Women, Work, and Gender in the Caribbean: Recent Research

Riva Berleant

One important insight that Caribbeanist scholars ought vigorously to expose is the centrality of the Caribbean region in significant global processes over the last five hundred years. One can, for example, argue convincingly that the commodity production systems throughout the circum-Caribbean initiated global modernization and industrialization in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Plantation tobacco production and timber exploitation exemplify the replacement of indigenous use values by European commodity values. The large sugar plantations of the Caribbean were early capital enterprises. The slave labor regime of the plantations prefigured industrial control of a rising proletariat in Europe. The Caribbean was more than a point of origin for modern production. In the eighteenth century, it was a world economic center, and

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