Juan A. Giusti Cordero

No seculo XVIII duas partes do leste da Espanhola (Santo Domingo Espanhol) fornecia carne e animais para o trabalho nos engenhos de acucar da colonia francesa ao oeste da Ilha de Saint Domingue, a mais rica produtora de acucar do mundo. Saint Domingue tambem comerciava ativamente com a costa de Venezuela que lhe fornecia animais como forca de tracao para os engenhos de acucar. Esse comercio, foco do circuito do contrabando de animais entre as colonias espanolas, francesas, inglesas e holandesas, foi muito ativo. Essas interacoes sugerem uma estrutura para a historia caribenha, ausente nas interpretacoes sobre a plantacao escravista. Meu estudo vai alem do arquipelago antilhano, ate o litoral de Sul America. Finalmente, o artigo ilumina o rol desempenhado pelos animais no comercio e cuja importância tem sido subestimada na historia caribenha. Palavras-chave : Caribe. America do Sul. Comercio de animais de trabalho Resumo No seculo XVIII duas partes do leste da Espanhola (Santo Doming...

The Spanish Antilles figure little in the Caribbean historiography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, whose protagonists are, in general, the English, French and Dutch Antilles. The scant importance of slave plantations in the Hispanic Antilles during these centuries seems to exclude them from the history of the region. However, a more integrated analysis of the history of the Caribbean reveals an important interaction between the production of provisions, cattle and wood from the Spanish Antilles and the neighboring "sugar islands", mainly mediated by the smuggling trade.

This preliminary essay introduces the Spanish translation of “The Caribbean as a Socio-cultural Area”, a major article by Sidney W. Mintz published a half-century ago. In “The Caribbean…”, Mintz questions the usual emphasis on the cultural (linguistic, political, racial and religious) diversity of the Caribbean. He conceptualizes culture itself as a historical process and the Caribbean as a distinct societal or sociocultural area with a history of its own vis a vis the continental Americas. An important dimension of the Caribbean is its trajectory as an old colonial region that is also an integral part of the history of the West, and which underwent an early modernity that resulted in historic backwardness. Mintz concludes that the Caribbean has been a cornerstone of the very configuration of the West, a key to the rise of global capitalism, and a hothouse of modernity. “The Caribbean ...” is not as well-known as it should be, in contrast with the importance that many scholars attac...

Sidney W. Mintz (1922-2015), anthropologist, leaves a body of work of world importance where he treated subjects as diverse as the life of a sugar worker, the complexity of slavery, the contradictions of modernity, and the anthropology of food, in the context of an ongoing inquiry on the emergence and scope of modernity in the Caribbean. He was born in New Jersey of immigrant parents from Belarus and obtained his Ph.D. in Columbia. At Columbia, he participated in the project that generated The People of Puerto Rico. From 1953 to 1975 was a professor at Yale University, and then at Johns Hopkins, until his retirement in 1996. His writings on the Caribbean and on slavery, rural proletarians, peasants, plantations and sugar remain fundamental. He devoted his last years to the study of food and eating, which he also produced path breaking work.

This book provides a thoroughly researched and richly illustrated account of a key element of the early modern Atlantic world: the sugar trade linking Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands. The study seeks to illuminate the economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions of this commerce. Indeed, trade supported Brazil's rise as the world's leading producer of sugar and the first great plantation colony. Likewise, the sugar trade boosted the economy of Portugal and contributed to the upsurge of the Dutch market. The increasing availability of sugar transformed the European diet (along with some medical theories); and sweets came to play an important part in a variety of social practices. In the political arena, sugar and sugar-producing areas became strategic targets in global conflicts. Furthermore, as this trade expanded, it figured centrally in the evolution of a wide range of financial techniques, business strategies, and institutions of governance - which merchants exploited in order to make their transactions more efficient. The book provides a clear examination of these increasingly sophisticated practices, and shows how they had much in common with today's business operations.

ABSTRACT This paper presents initial efforts to establish the San Juan Urban Long-Term Research Area Exploratory (ULTRA-Ex), a long-term program aimed at developing transdisciplinary social-ecological system (SES) research to address vulnerability and sustainability for the municipality of San Juan. Transdisciplinary approaches involve the collaborations between researchers, stakeholders, and citizens to produce sociallyrelevant knowledge and support decision-making. We characterize the transdisciplinary arrangement emerging in San Juan ULTRA-Ex as a knowledge-action network composed of multiple formal and informal actors (e.g., scientists, policymakers, civic organizations and other stakeholders) where knowledge, ideas, and strategies for sustainability are being produced, evaluated, and validated. We describe in this paper the on-theground social practices and dynamics that emerged from developing a knowledge-action network in our local context. Specifically, we present six social practices that were crucial to the development of our knowledgeaction network: 1) understanding local framings; 2) analyzing existing knowledge-action systems in the city; 3) framing the social-ecological research agenda; 4) collaborative knowledge production and integration; 5) boundary objects and practices; and 6) synthesis, application, and adaptation. We discuss key challenges and ways to move forward in building knowledge-action networks for sustainability. Our hope is that the insights learned from this process will stimulate broader discussions on how to develop knowledge for urban sustainability, especially in tropical cities where these issues are under-explored.

This article is a summary of my dissertation, "Labor, Ecology and History in a Puerto Rican Plantation Region: Piñones (Loiza), Puerto Rico, 1770-1950" (SUNY-Binghamton, 1994). It was incorrectly placed under the title of my dissertation in a previous uploading to academia.edu.

The People of Puerto Rico is a comprehensive ethnography of major types of rural communities in pre-1950 Puerto Rico but was less successful in reconnecting those localities in a coherent portrayal of the island's social formation. A reexamination of this work's best-known subcultures, Santa Isabel (Sidney Mintz' “Cañamelar”) and Ciales (Eric Wolf's “San José”), offers entry points to these communities, as well as to the key concepts that Mintz and Wolf constructed reciprocally through their research: rural proletarian and peasant, plantation and hacienda. Also present are the too-implicit spatial referents of these concepts—lowland and highland, foreland and hinterland—and their associated crop types, sugar and coffee. In this article, the historical space of Santa Isabel and Ciales will be reconsidered, in part with reference to often-overlooked nuances and caveats in Mintz' and Wolf's chapters. Foregrounding the spatial/ecological referent in “Cañamelar” and “San José” opens our sights to counterpoints between sugar and livestock, and to patterns of highland-lowland migration, kin networks, and social interaction. Familiar concepts take on new meanings as we discern supra-municipal, sub-insular, and intermediate island regions and move closer to specifying historical situations (Mintz) while renewing our theorization (Wolf).

Sugar was the single most valuable international commodity before the rise of oil. Cultivated primarily in overseas colonies, its study offers insights into political, economic, and cultural history, agriculture, slavery, technology, race, class, identity, and the nature of ...