Commodity Trading and the Lome Negotiations: The Case of the Caribbean Sugar Industy

Abstract

In the long view the fortunes of the sugar industry in the Anglophone Caribbean are distinguished by an initial period of remarkable prosperity in the 17th and 18th centuries, a so-called golden age, and then by a relatively extended phase of more or less uninterrupted decline. Indeed, given the persistent allusions to decline in the scholarly literature it might come as a surprise to some that the industry has managed to survive at all. What is less surprising is that in both the upward and downward swings, the more influential factors have revolved less around labor or capital than around plain market conditions.