By Gabriel J. Christian, Esquire
November 3, 2025
In Tribute
This essay is dedicated to the late Eddie “Izzar” Toulon, visionary co-founder and General Manager of Frontline Cooperative Bookstore, first Executive of the Dominica Festivals Commission, and to the Frontline Bookstore poets, workers, and writers.
Prologue
When our parents built our home on Didier Lane in lower Goodwill in 1970, it was on land that once belonged to an old sugar estate, soaked in the blood, sweat, and toil of my enslaved ancestors. At that time cane fields still sprawled toward the deep-water port at Woodbridge Bay, skirting the perimeter of the Government Stock Farm and the area now occupied by the Dominica State College. In that summer of 1970, I earned a few cents on several afternoons after class by carrying stalks of sugar cane from the fields that still flourished in my neighborhood to the roadside. The piles of cane on the roadside were then picked up by Bedford or Humber trucks to be taken to the few remaining sugar mills at Belfast, Batalie, or River Estate.
More fascinating still, and an enduring remnant of the engineering ingenuity born of both enslaved Africans and their overseers, was the huge water wheel beside the Goodwill Junior High School. That water wheel, standing across from where the Agricultural, Industrial & Development Bank now sits, was powered by water channeled from the Roseau River through a canal that snaked behind the Goodwill Parish Hall. It was from that slave-era use of water via canal that the name “Canal Lane” emerged—the very same lane on which stood the Library of the Pan-Africanist and pro-socialist Movement for a New Dominica (MND).
It was on Canal Lane that I first learned of slave rebellions across the Americas, and from that knowledge sprang my resolve to join those who desired the liberation of African and Indigenous peoples. It is worth noting that during my twenty years of childhood and through sixth form in Dominica, no class or public lecture that I attended ever focused on the science and technology that underpinned the sugar industry in Dominica. I posit that studying the past, including a thorough examination of the science and technology-based industries such as sugar, lime, and others in Dominica, is crucial to shaping a beneficial future for our nation. Too often, we walk around our island home oblivious to the history that shaped the nation, and unaware of the remnants of scientific and technological marvels that once dotted our landscape, enriching others.
We must consistently examine our past and present reality in a resolute, organized, and systematic manner. It is such an approach that inspired the Dominica Academy of Arts & Sciences (2000), and prior to that, the launching of Pont Casse Press in 1992 by me and Irving W. Andre. Such analysis is not an idle pursuit, as it can lead to a better understanding that can birth new pathways to progress for our people.
The Sugar Industry – Capitalism & Slavery
From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the Caribbean sugar plantation fused field, factory, finance, and far-flung trade into a single, purpose-built machine for producing profit. Cane was planted in regimented blocks; cut to a drumbeat of timetables; crushed by water-, wind-, animal-, and later steam-power; boiled in multi-kettle “batteries” under a foreman’s command; and then converted into semi-refined sugar, molasses, and rum for export. This was not a loose agrarian pursuit: it was a tightly integrated industrial system—arguably the world’s first fully industrialized agro-complex—long before Manchester’s cotton mills or Pittsburgh’s steel furnaces became emblems of mechanized modernity. Anthropologist Sidney Mintz captured this fusion of production and consumption in a single arc, tracing how plantation output fed metropolitan diets and factory labor alike. Historians have since shown that sugar’s organization, scale, and capital intensity made the plantation a factory in the field.
The system ran on coerced labor. European demand for sugar skyrocketed, and with it the need for workers who could be forced into the grueling, around-the-clock schedules of cane cultivation and boiling. The transatlantic traffic in captive Africans expanded to meet that demand; by the eighteenth century, the majority of Africans dragged across the Middle Passage were destined for cane fields and boiling houses. The sugar regimen’s lethal tempo—cutting, milling, and boiling bound to the perishability of the cane—made mortality high and reproduction low, so planters “replenished” their labor forces by purchasing more captives. In a devastating feedback loop, sugar’s profits intensified the slave trade, and the slave trade sustained sugar’s profits.
No work interrogated this engine of accumulation more provocatively than Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery. Williams situated West Indian sugar, and the Atlantic slave system that sustained it, at the heart of Britain’s economic ascent—financing merchants, shipbuilders, insurers, and bankers whose capital and expertise lubricated Britain’s broader industrialization. Whether one endorses every plank of the “Williams Thesis” or engages with later revisions, the evidence of sugar-and-slavery’s fiscal and institutional imprint on British capitalism is formidable.
Those same circuits bound the British Caribbean to North America. New England’s economy was deeply entangled with the West Indies: fish, livestock, timber, and household goods sailed south; sugar, molasses, and rum returned north; credit, commission agency, and shipbuilding blossomed in between. Before independence, New Englanders depended on slave-labor plantation regimes as the primary market for their exports and as a crucial source of re-exportable molasses and rum—commodities that underwrote profits, taxes, and wages from Boston to Newport.
Elite educational institutions were not immune to this commerce. Brown University’s own research has documented the Brown family’s direct ties to Atlantic slaving ventures and West Indian trade; Harvard has acknowledged myriad links to slavery and slave-produced goods that persisted well into the nineteenth century, including the financing of sugarcane research connected to Caribbean plantations. Such findings do not exhaust the story, but they anchor a plain truth: revenues from slave economies—and specifically sugar and its by-products—flowed into the cultural, financial, and educational infrastructure of early New England.
If Barbados pioneered the English sugar revolution, islands across the archipelago built their own industrial ecologies. Consider Dominica: a rugged island of fewer than 300 square miles where planters nonetheless mapped watercourses, valleys, and passes into a latticework of estates and mills. By the late eighteenth century, documentary evidence indicates that dozens of mills—fifty-four water mills, eighteen cattle mills, and six windmills, as noted in a 1785 survey—were driving cane through rollers into vats and stills. At Canefield Estate alone, enslaved workers produced not only sugar but thousands of gallons of rum annually, an integrated manufacturing flow emblematic of the island’s broader sugar-molasses-rum complex.
Jamaica, Britain’s richest sugar colony by the eighteenth century, reveals another dimension of this industrialization: infrastructure. Jamaica’s railways—among the oldest in the world—opened in 1845 to link Kingston with the sugar-growing interior, purpose-built to move cane, sugar, and people along the plantation economy’s arteries. Rail in Jamaica was not a novelty grafted onto a quaint agrarian sector; it was a logical extension of a production system that demanded speed, throughput, and coordination.
The Technology of the Sugar Industry -Reclaiming Innovation?
Even more striking is the technical skill of enslaved African workers, whose expertise significantly shaped Atlantic industrialization in ways that were only recently recognized. New scholarship in History and Technology argues that Black metallurgists in Jamaica developed an iron-refining practice—“potting and stamping”—that Henry Cort later adapted into his celebrated late-eighteenth century rolling and puddling methods. If so, then a technique forged by enslaved artisans in a Caribbean sugar colony became a cornerstone of Britain’s iron and steel revolution—its provenance obscured by patents and power, its authorship erased in the metropole. The deeper lesson is clear: enslaved people were not merely coerced bodies; they were technicians and innovators whose knowledge sustained and, at times, transformed imperial industry. The question for the 21st century is how we can reclaim that legacy of innovation to boost our fortunes in a dynamic globalized world economy.
None of this should romanticize the plantation as “modernity” in any emancipatory sense. The factory-like organization, the capital intensity of mills and boiling houses, the integration of distillation, the adoption of water, wind, animal, and later steam power—all the signatures of industrial production—rested on terror and coercion. But they also explain sugar’s outsized role in Atlantic capitalism. Plantations generated commodity surpluses and financial instruments, stimulating shipbuilding, marine insurance, and urban warehousing. They normalized the wholesale use of credit and demanded continuous process innovation to protect margins in a volatile market. In short, sugar’s brand of industrial agriculture trained empires to think—and profit—at an industrial scale.
The Maryland Connection – Dominica Chronicle of 1825
Yet the ties between the Caribbean and North America were not only economic but also cultural, in the form of shared tastes, technologies, and everyday practices that persist to this day. The same Atlantic commerce that exchanged sugar for cod, cornmeal, and timber also shaped culinary habits that are still visible today. Salted codfish, or “saltfish,” and cornmeal remain staples on Dominican, Barbadian, and Trinidadian tables—culinary echoes of an early modern trade triangle that sent salted fish and corn from the cold waters of New England and Nova Scotia to feed enslaved laborers in the tropics. As my former Dominica Sixth Form College classmate Jacqueline Dupigny showed me, an 1825 Dominican newspaper recorded flour imports from Baltimore, Maryland; advertisements for “Dr. William Baker of Bladensburg” promoting patent medicines for stomach complaints; and even runaway-slave notices whose engraved figures mirrored those printed in U.S. papers of the same era—quite possibly impressed from the very same colonial type forged in the Thirteen Colonies.
Dr. Irving Andre, co-founder of Pont Casse Press, examines the Dominica Chronicle newspaper collection from the 1800s with collection-owner Jacqueline Dupigny of the Society for Historic Architectural Preservation & Enhancement (SHAPE)
That archival thread would one day reach into my own life. As a young law student, newly graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, I took the Maryland Bar Examination in Baltimore—at the Inner Harbor, where slave ships once docked, and where vessels bound for Dominica, carrying cornmeal, wheat flour, and medicines, once lay at ease. Not far from there, the famed Baltimore Clippers, whose sleek design drew inspiration from Caribbean shipwrights, were built for speed to evade capture by the British Royal Navy after the slave trade was outlawed.
I often pass through Bladensburg, Maryland, on my way to practice law before the District Court in Hyattsville—unaware for many years that the same town was once home to a medical doctor, William Baker, whose remedies for “stomach upset” were advertised in the September 21, 1825, Dominica Chronicle during the slave era. In a reprint from the Boston Courier, Baker’s medical potion for dysentery is recommended by Joseph Kent of Bladensburg, of Prince George’s County, Maryland. Kent was a physician, slave owner, farmer, politician, Maryland Governor, and later a US congressman and Senator. His article in the Dominica Chronicle (even where a reprint from the Boston Courier speaks to the strong links between the slave economies of the United States and Dominica in that era.
On the same page as the article on medicine is an advertisement for a runaway slave in Roseau, Dominica, named “George,” owned by William Boyd. Those living links between Maryland and Dominica—between ports, printers, and people—remind us that history surrounds us still, embedded in the very ground we walk and the professions we practice.
The Dominica Chronicle of September 21, 1825
The owner of the Bladensburg, Maryland, slave plantation, Dr. Joseph Kent (January 14, 1779 – November 24, 1837), a future US congressman, senator, and Maryland Governor, whose writings on a cure for dysentery (a reprint from the Boston Courier) appeared on the front page of the Dominica Chronicle of September 28, 1825. While trade and interaction between Dominica and Maryland may have dwindled today, the article by Kent is proof of the strong relationships in commerce, information exchange, and the apparatus of slavery between the West Indies and the early colonists in what is now the United States of America, which continued after the Revolutionary War of 1776.
To track the ripples is to see a whole: cane fields feeding mills, mills feeding transatlantic trade, trade feeding metropolitan industry, universities, and infrastructural experiments from railways to refineries. Small islands, such as Dominica, condensed this system into compact geographies dense with machinery and human suffering; vast islands, such as Jamaica, connected that system to national-scale networks of transportation and metallurgy. And across the Atlantic, New England’s ports, distilleries, countinghouses, and colleges drank deeply from West Indian sugar wealth—material proof that the Caribbean sugar complex was not peripheral to modern economic history, but central to it.
(Above) Advertisement for a runaway enslaved African in a New York newspaper in 1823. It bears a striking resemblance to a similar public notice of an enslaved African on Dominica published in the Dominica Chronicle of September 28, 1825 (below)
That understanding must now inform how we shape our collective future. The wealth systems, the science and technology, and institutions born of Caribbean sugar and Atlantic slavery continue to reverberate in global inequities today—from the distribution of capital and land to the very hierarchies of knowledge and trade. Studying the past is not merely to catalogue suffering but to expose the architecture of exploitation that still underpins much of the modern world and the tools produced that can birth a better dispensation when used wisely and fairly.
Of those who have shed light on our past, challenges, and unfinished tasks
We must, therefore, give due credit to Dominican historians and thinkers—Dr. William Riviere, Dr. Irving André, Dr. Lennox Honychurch, and Dr. Thomson Fontaine—whose scholarship has reclaimed our history from silence and distortion, and to the enlightened leadership of statesmen such as Premier Edward Oliver LeBlanc and Minister of Education Henckell Lochinvar Christian, who insisted that we know ourselves and our past. They reminded us that the wealth extracted from our people by the bloody lash of greed was met, across centuries, by the courage of those who resisted—by the valiant battles of slave rebels and maroons whose defiance and love of liberty compelled the end of chattel slavery itself.
In our own time, British author and journalist Polly Pattullo, founder of Papillotte Press, has further extended that emancipatory project through literature. Her works—most notably Your Time Is Done Now, a study of maroon resistance—along with her writing on Phyllis Shand Allfrey, the white Dominican-born socialist, poet, and visionary thinker who, in alliance with her Black compatriot Emmanuel Christopher Loblack, forged the Dominica Labour Party, continue the intellectual and cultural struggle for justice. Their partnership ushered in the most progressive social reforms on Dominica since the Emancipation of enslaved Africans in 1834. As Pattullo herself has noted, the modern recognition of multiculturalism and diversity in publishing—though still incomplete—builds on that very legacy of cross-racial solidarity and the conviction that Caribbean stories must be told, preserved, and honored. Her press, Papillotte, gives voice to the society, culture, and politics of our region, publishing books that might otherwise not exist and advancing the same mission of inclusion that our ancestors fought to realize.
Like the pioneering literary and historical initiative of Pont Casse Press, which Dr. Irving André and I founded in 1992, such work affirms that the struggle for progress must be rooted in mass education and a deep knowledge of our history. Only by awakening the minds of our people can we eradicate the social inequities and injustices that are the lingering heirs of slavery. With Pont Casse Press, we have wielded our pens like hammers—smashing the curse of ignorance and the brainwashed education models of colonial servitude upon the anvil of truth forged by our ancestors who were once enslaved. Knowledge, truth, and courage remain the only enduring instruments of emancipation.
Today, however, we face new storms upon the old seas. Across the world, those whose philosophies of life are rooted in white supremacy and colonial domination once again occupy high office or strive to ascend to it. Their intent—whether masked in populist slogans or cloaked in nationalism—is to destroy the global surge toward democracy and liberty that was the enduring legacy of the slave rebellions, abolitionist crusades, and post–World War II independence movements. As sure as day follows night, there can be no peace nor progress unless enlightened humanitarian thinkers, leaders, and builders of nations turn away from the craven practices when power. To progress, we must shed society of tyrannical rule, corruption in office, racial prejudice, and imperial domination, and instead commit to building a world anchored in justice and mutual respect.
We must return to the lofty ideals that inspired humanity’s greatest charters of liberty—the Magna Carta, due process of law, and the Rights of Man proclaimed during the Enlightenment. As Voltaire urged, the rule of reason, freedom of speech, and tolerance must triumph over superstition, dogma, and tyranny. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789)—though imperfectly applied—embodied these principles of equality and government accountability, ideals that transcended race, creed, or nation. Those principles, born in Europe yet universal in aspiration, must again be summoned to redeem a fractured world. In the slave era, those who engaged in slavery, such as Joseph Kent of Bladensburg, Maryland, found ways in which to collaborate with those similarly engaged in that odious colonial enterprise that included slavery. Today, those of us who yearn for progress and freedom must demonstrate a similar commitment to solidarity, diligent effort, unified purpose, and mutually beneficial partnerships.
Through struggle, we have tasted the sweet air of liberty from chattel slavery, but the work to improve our lot is not done. In that struggle—stretching from the history of slavery and sugar mills of the Caribbean to the halls of power today—the eternal cause of liberty remains humanity’s greatest unfinished revolution.
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