Dominica in the World Economy
By Michel-Rolph Trouillot
With a new Introduction by Ryan Cecil Jobson and 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 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.
“What a thrill to have Trouillot’s critically important Peasants and Capital re-released! As a graduate student, this book was a beacon that guided me to think across and among scales within a global infrastructure not only for transnational political and economic life, but also for emergent forms of alterity and world-building. It demonstrated how small places tell big stories, and indeed how they complicate the stories we already think we know about autonomy, exploitation, and cosmopolitanism—a thrilling reminder of the prescience of Caribbean coloniality and decoloniality!”
— Deborah A. Thomas, author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair
“Peasants and Capital is an ethnographic gift, bearing close witness to Caribbean patterns of economic self-possession in a volatile capitalist world system. In this reprint, Trouillot’s analytic genius sits between Jobson’s insightful new introduction and Esprit’s richly grounded postscript. My grandfather’s people were peasants from the island’s west; Grandma’s brother was a banana “selector” at a boxing plant in the north. Trouillot sketches a multilayered view of the worlds they inhabited. And, amidst today’s crises, he offers invaluable lessons for fathoming Caribbean futures.”
— Adom Philogene Heron, author of Still Standing: The Ti Kais of Dominica
“This republication of Peasants and Capital is reason for celebration and some necessary soul-searching. The book set a standard for what, by the late 1980s, anthropology might have become, but didn’t: a discipline devoted not just to analysis of the impact of the capitalist “world system” on its “peripheries,” but to the agentive making of local lifeworlds and histories under conditions not of one’s choosing. In his introduction, Ryan Jobson has done us all a tremendous favor, reminding us that the questions we still grapple with were pre-thought in this previously unacknowledged classic.”
— Stephan Palmié, author of The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1949-2012) was a Haitian 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.
© HAU Books 2025
ISBN: 9781914363221 [paperback]
ISBN: 9781914363238 [PDF]
ISBN: 9781914363245 [e-book]
6″ x 9″, 460 pp.
10 maps, 31 tables
$35
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