The Economic History of the Caribbean since the Napoleonic Wars

Many general histories of the Caribbean have been written since the arrival of the Europeans in 1492. There have also been a number of economic histories covering the age when sugar was ‘king’ and the colonial possessions generated huge rents for their imperial masters. Yet since the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 little has been written on the economic history of the region as a whole, although there have been some excellent studies of individual countries.

There are various reasons for this. For many countries, but not all, the nineteenth century was seen as a period of decline, and therefore the region was considered unworthy of serious attention by economic historians. The data for the different territories are not easily comparable and are hard to access in some cases. As a result, scholars have tended to focus on subregions – such as the British West Indies before independence or the French-speaking territories. For British, Dutch and French scholars, other colonies outside the Caribbean have attracted much more interest. Scholarship in different parts of the world has paid attention to the economic development of Cuba and Puerto Rico, but the rest of the Caribbean has generally attracted much less interest from the same researchers. The first independent countries – Haiti and to a much smaller extent the Dominican Republic – have generated monographs and articles published inside and outside those countries, but comparatively little of this has focused on their economies.