Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830-1848 by Dale W. Tomich. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv+353. $46.50 Christopher Chase-Dunn Johns Hopkins University There are now a large number of what may be called "in the world-system" studies which focus on a specific locality and time period while examining the larger structural context within which local social change occurs. Though many of these are excellent, Dale Tomich's study of Martinique between 1830 and 1848 goes well beyond the others. In addition to painting the larger context, Tomich discovers the actual links and contradictory interactions between global-level, intermediate and local processes. His study shows how: the French and Haitian revolutions, the struggle between Britain and France, Britain's victory and reshaping of the global economy, French recovery and protectionism, the politics of tariffs and interest groups contending within the French state, and the limitations of slave-based sugar production on Martinique interacted to produce the crisis of colonial production on this Caribbean island colony of France. This is historical sociology from the bottom up, from the top down, and with close attention paid to those actors and structures operating in between. The restructuring of interstate relations and the international division of labor in the first half of the 19th century radically transformed the rules of the game for producers of colonial products such as sugar. The rising British hegemony reconstituted world market and political structures, including forcible intervention by the British Navy in the slave trade between Africa and the New World. The French organized a defensive response to rising British hegemony which included tariff protectionism and the reinvigoration of colonial production for the mother country. This gave slave production of sugar in Martinique and other French colonies a new lease on life, and ironically, the relationship between metropole and colony became temporarily reversed as French consumers paid very high prices and the French state heavily subsidized colonial sugar producers. The emergence of sugar beet production in France and pressures for trade liberalization eventually popped the slave-sugar bubble. Tomich provides a close study of the technical and social aspects of the process of sugar production as it was accomplished on Martinique. His detailed examination of the institution of slavery as it operated on Martinique is a valuable contribution to the comparative literature on the labor process. The main body of the book analyzes the forces and constraints which shaped the organizational and technological aspects of sugar production during this period. This reveals the multilevel legal, political, financial and ecological constraints which inhibited the reorganization of sugar production on Martinique. The expansion of sugar exports was accomplished primarily through the creation of new, small plantations on marginal land and the intensification of slave labor. This is contrasted to developments on those Caribbean islands which were turning to sugar production for the first time, such as Puerto Rico and Cuba, where larger scale plantations and sugar processing mills were being developed. In an interesting theoretical chapter Tomich develops a general discussion of commodified slavery which employs Marx's concept of labor power and the distinction between constant and variable capital to argue that commodified slavery constrains the reorganization of production processes to a greater extent than does wage labor because slave-owning capitalists are unable to separate the maintenance costs and capital costs of slave labor from the direct costs of applying labor to production. Tomich argues that wage labor is superior in this regard because the capitalist only pays for labor power and can easily calculate the direct costs of labor in production. This encourages the rational use of labor power and the implementation of labor saving devices when it is economical. He concludes that slavery is less likely to be reorganized in response to market pressures than wage labor because planters cannot easily separate the costs of slave labor from the costs of maintenance of the slaves. And this is advanced as part of the explanation for the technological stagnation evident in the sugar expansion on Martinique. There two problems with this arguement. First, if the ability to separately calculate production vs. maintenance and capital costs were so important to capitalists they would only rent machines, not buy them. Tomich contends that slaves are part of "constant" capital, like machines. This does not seem to be a big problem for the rational utilization of machines. Secondly, one important reason for the collapse of French colonial sugar production was the greater scale of production and greater efficiency of other competing producers (e.g. in Cuba and Puerto Rico) who were also using slave labor. Perhaps slave labor is less amenable to technological change than wage labor is (because it is often less flexible), but this cannot be the main reason why Martinique failed to rationalize production. Tomich's own analysis reveals many other important factors which operated as constraints and disincentives to the rationalization of sugar production on Martinique. One of the main developments which created the crisis of plantation agriculture in the 19th century was the abolition of the slave trade and the abolition of slavery. This obviously had little to do with the "irrationality" of slave production from the point of view of the slave-owning planters, who fought abolition tooth and nail. Tomich declares that it is beyond the scope of his study to analyze the causes of the British decision to clamp down on slavery. He says on p. 29 "The same historical processes of development of the world economy that led to the abolition of slavery within the British empire resulted in its expansion and intensification outside of the empire," but he does not tell us what these processes were. There are several structural theories which explain abolition and it would not have been irrelevant to Tomich's purposes for him to tell us his judgement of these. Though my quibbles may need to be addressed in future research, Tomich's is one of the very best works in the categories of Caribbean studies and "in the world-system" linkage studies. The book will be widely read by scholars of plantation slavery, French colonialism and the nineteenth century world- system. It will be useful in advanced courses on historical sociology, development studies and global restructuring.