Curtin, The Plantation Complex

The political, economic, and social implications of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade extended far beyond the Americas, according to Philip D. Curtin. In his essay "The Tropical Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade," Curtin addresses the shortcomings in approaching the slave trade as a purely pan-American phenomenon. Referring to the vast network of sugar and other cash crop plantations as a "complex," Curtin illustrates how the entire world, from Northern Europe to Australia to East Asia, was involved in or affected by the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Moreover, Curtin claims that although the trans-Atlantic slave trade culminated in the eighteenth century, its roots run much deeper in time and its repercussions were felt well into the 20th century. The earliest sugar plantations were not in fact in the Caribbean but rather in the Eastern Mediterranean. The plantation complex was "inextricably intertwined with sugar," (p. 3).

There are several features of the plantation "complex," according to Curtin, that place the phenomenon in a broader historical and temporal context. The plantation complex depended of course on forced labor. However, the population was not self-sustaining and therefore depended on a continual influx of new laborers (p. 2). The result was to dramatically alter the world's demographic features, and not only those of the Americas and Africa. The plantation complex was also an offshoot of feudalism; its structure resembled medieval feudal societies in which a land-owning master exerted authority over his subjects but who was at the same time subject to his own political master. Finally, Curtin shows how the creation of highly specialized goods transformed the global market system, encouraging or even forcing nations from all corners of the globe to participate in a massive network of trading. In the early days of the plantation complex, Europeans used silver mined in South America to purchase goods from India which were in turn used to purchase slaves in Africa; those slaves were imported as property to the plantations in the America to fuel the plantation economy. Curtin illustrates that ultimately the abolition of the slave trade was also linked to the "democratic revolutions" in France and the United States.