Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Classics in Ethnographic Theory)

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