Dominica in the World Economy
By Michel-Rolph Trouillot
New edition
With an Introduction by Ryan Cecil Jobson
Afterword by Schuyler Esprit
A new edition of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s influential ethnography of a village in Dominica.
Over thirty-five years ago, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s debut ethnography, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy, dared to regard peasants not as vestiges of premodern economies but as instrumental to, and integrated in, a capitalist world system. Combining historical ethnography with an intimate portrait of a banana-producing eastern Caribbean village, this multi-sited study demonstrates how multinational capital thrives on the surplus production of peasant cultivators. At the same time, it investigates how peasantries generate independent conceptions of value and subsistence in the process of building a new postcolonial state in Dominica. This new edition of Peasants and Capital invites anthropologists to revisit the methodological innovations of this multi-scalar study and for readers to meditate on the continued vitality of peasant livelihoods in the Caribbean today.
Ryan Cecil Jobson’s new introduction situates this edition in the context of Trouillot’s remarkable life and career. Jobson reminds us of the book’s enduring theoretical and ethnographic significance and asks us to consider how the entanglement of peasants from Dominica in national and world affairs has been impacted by more recent histories, such as the end of preferential markets for Caribbean bananas, the migration of “banana children” to regional and metropolitan urban centers, and the devastation of Dominica by Hurricane Maria.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) was a Haitian-American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at The University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History and Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World.
Ryan Cecil Jobson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of Chicago. His book, The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago is published with The University of Chicago Press.
Schuyler Esprit is the founder and director of Create Caribbean Research Institute, the first digital humanities center in the Caribbean. Born and raised in Dominica, she has taught in both the US and Caribbean, and she is the author of Imprinted: A History of Reading in the Caribbean.
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ISBN: 9781914363221 [paperback]
ISBN: 9781914363238 [PDF]
ISBN: 9781914363245 [e-book]
6″ x 9″, 460 pp.
10 maps, 31 tables
$35
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