Between 1974 and 1977, as part of a wider attempt by Prime Minister Michael Manley's regime to carry out a democratic reformist strategy of development, the three largest sugar estates in Jamaica were converted into worker-managed farms. Within a few years, however, the cooperative program was in disarray as the farms faced economic setbacks and as political conflicts developed among the sugar workers, local authorities, and the government. Drawing on his extensive field research in Jamaica, Dr. Feuer traces the development and decline of the cooperative system and discusses the implications for the possibility of democratic reform. In his view, the logic of the cooperativization process conflicted with the priorities of the middle class, which continued to dominate the Jamaican economy. As a result, the reforms were never firmly rooted in a political coalition with the resources to carry them out. In light of the Jamaican experience, Dr. Feuer considers such questions as: What are the obstacles a nonrevolutionary regime is likely to face in an effort to help the poor? How feasible is it to mobilize the requisite political and administrative resources and neutralize the inherent constraints to reform?

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Located within the plantation economy model of the “New World Group” of The University of the West Indies, this book explores how the changes in the European Union’s sugar regime impacted a sugar-dependent community in Jamaica. It details how the end of centuries of preferential treatment of Jamaican sugar in the British/European market in 2005 worsened the social and environmental realities of the Monymusk community in Clarendon, Jamaica, which depended on the sugar industry. In describing the response of the Jamaican Government to the changes in the EU Sugar Regime, and the subsequent roll-out of an EU funded adaptation strategy, the author provides some unique perspectives on this process, drawing on his experience as a senior civil servant involved in the process. The book also highlights the continued social and environmental impact on the area since 2015 . The book concludes with a discussion on the empirical findings and how those findings contribute to the debates on the dependency perpetuated by the Plantation Economy Model of development and the failure of neo-liberal influenced government policies, as well as the lack of imagination of post-independent governments to break this dependency and deliver on the promise of independence.

Michaeline A. Crichlow extends the contemporary critique of development projects by examining the political and discursive relationship of the state to the land-based working people, or 'smallholders, ' in modern Jamaica. The first book of its kind, Negotiating Caribbean Freedom does for Jamaican historiography and sociology what Akhil Gupta's PostColonial Developments did for studies of India. Michaeline A. Crichlow gives us an incredibly nuanced discussion of how development dominates the lives of the subsistance peasantry, not through force, but through the instrumentalization of social relationships that were once ends in themselves. For example, what were once effective agricultural practices--embedded in the every day lives of smallholders all over the island--have, in the interest of serving international captial, been bureaucratized to the point that they are untenable to support the livelihoods of smallholders. Not content to measure the success or failure of development to deliver on its promises, she discloses both the continuities and differences between development projects of very different political regimes and helps to establish why smallholders support development projects even when those projects fail to address their needs.

Traversing 2,500 years of global history, Ulbe Bosma shows how sugar, once a luxury reserved for Eastern emperors, stoked a mania in the West, transforming diets and ecosystems, destroying and creating cultures, and shaping the history of bondage and freedom. A major source of calories only since 1900, sugar has suddenly revolutionized our world.