Exploring Caribbean economic history
These are not the best of times for any new venture. National economies are doing poorly generally and so are institutional ones. It is especially encouraging, therefore, that a group of international scholars could found a new association of historians dealing with, of all subjects, the economic history of the Caribbean. This is not to suggest that the Caribbean region does not have an extraordinarily rich economic history, and an equally rich collection of international practitioners who actively engage themselves in researching and writing about that aspect of the Caribbean.
Indeed, it was that potentially rich reality that moved a small group of scholars led by Oscar Zanetti Lecuona of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC in its Cuban acronym) and Jorge Enrique Elias Caro of the University of Magdalena department in Colombia to convene the inaugural meeting of the Association of Economic Historians of the Caribbean (AHEC). The conveners of this congress demonstrated enormous confidence and optimism, inviting anyone interested in the “stability, instability and progress of the Caribbean between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century” to attend a meeting in Santa Marta, Colombia, between November 2 and 5.
Santa Marta on the north-eastern coast of Colombia is a not an especially attractive location for an international congress dealing with the Caribbean. Although it is a genuinely Caribbean location, it is not easily accessible by air from outside the country. To get there requires routing through Bogotá or Panama City. Barranquilla and Cartagena are Santa Marta’s neighbouring Caribbean coastal cities. They are respectively about 100 kilometres and 200 kilometres to the west with an excellent bus service connecting all three cities. All three cities are on air routes fixed like isolated spokes to the two major airports in Bogotá.
Around Santa Marta, the attractions are numerous. The principal historical attraction derives from the fact that Simón Bolívar, the great liberator of Spanish South America, died there in December 1830 at the lovely rum-distilling estate of La Quinta San Pedro Alejandrino. The estate, a national monument, boasts a large conference centre with ongoing expositions of art. The city is close to lovely beaches at Rodadero and Bello Horizonte to the west, and at Taganga and Tayrona National Natural Park to the east.
The call to talk about the Caribbean elicited wide international response. More than 150 scholars representing 22 countries congregated in the convention centre on the historic grounds of La Quinta San Pedro Alejandrino. Besides local Colombian scholars, others came from across the Americas including Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Canada, the United States, as well as from England, France, Austria and Spain. For a change the Caribbean itself was well represented. Scholars came from institutions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Barbados and Trinidad.
The wide range of origin of the attendees reflected a strong interest in the Caribbean in overseas universities. The Caribbean is really important in countries like the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil. Beside trade, the Caribbean has long been associated with migration and culture. Historic links between the Caribbean as a region, the rest of the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa were brought out repeatedly in the opening keynote address and in many individual papers during the three days.
Concurrent multiple sessions covered a bewildering variety of themes from agrarian issues and landholding, the environment, economic thought, banking, scholarship, manufacturing, mining, economic diversification, tourism, and the history of sugar and plantation economies. Tobacco, aspects of labour organisation, insurance and entrepreneurship in the Caribbean were discussed in several sessions. Some sessions dealt with economic aspects of a single country, or a narrow economic theme. Others were thoroughly regional and covered vast areas of geography over long periods of time.
Rebeca Gómez Betancourt of the Université Lumière Lyon 2 discussed the life and career of Edwin Walter Kemmerer, the Princeton University money theoretician who advocated strong currencies and balanced budgets in his advice to governments around the world. Rita Pemberton of the University of the West Indies examined the Trinidad Oil Industry between 1910 and 1939 and the implications for economic development and environmental degradation. Frank Moya Pons, president of the Dominican Academy of History in the Dominican Republic described the creation of the first privately owned commercial bank in that country.
By contrast, Christian Cwik from the University of Cologne in Germany looked at the extremely vast network of Jews and New Christians in the expansion of the sugar business around Europe and the Americas between the16th and the 19th centuries. One family of Jews had connections dispersed in Amsterdam, London, Cadiz, Pernambuco, Bridgetown, Suriname, Jamaica, Vera Cruz and New York. Similarly, José Miguel Lana-Berasain of the Public University in Navarre, Spain, examined the cocoa and beef trade through the long distance Spanish family firm of Esteban Linares whose contacts hosted and provided information to the distinguished German naturalist and traveller, Alexander von Humboldt.
The congress highlighted diverse ways in which the Caribbean was a true Mediterranean-like hub in the days of sailing ships. The combination of wind and currents gave enormous strategic importance to the islands. All major sea lanes traversed the area. But the value of the region far exceeded its simple geographical importance. The Caribbean provided a vital dynamic catalyst for trade and commerce that involved every continent between the 16th and the 19th centuries. It produced important commercial commodities such as sugar, coffee, indigo and cotton crucial to an industrialising Europe. It contributed food crops such as the banana, potato, cassava, and peanut that altered diets in Africa as well as Europe. Some crops were native to the Caribbean. Others were introduced and cultivated in ways never attempted before. Ubiquitous Caribbean labourers were found everywhere. They built the phenomenal canal between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean in the Isthmus of Panama, and worked prodigiously on plantations from Panama and Colombia to Cuba and the United States. Congresses like these remind us all of the enduring importance of the Caribbean to modern history.