Journal of Labor and Society (2022) 1–4

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Book Review

∵
J. Sprague. Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the
Transnational Capitalist Class (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2020),
322 pp. $32.95 (paperback).

Several scholars have written on the Transnational elites, and Jeb Sprague’s
Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the
Transnational Capitalist Class is the latest scholarship in the field that specially
focuses on the transnational elites in the region and their allegiance to the
furtherance of imperialism.
Arguing that the Caribbean was integrated in the capitalist system from the
first colonial expedition to the establishment of plantation slavery that pro-
duced the wealth that created the Industrial revolution, to Caribbean peoples
in Haiti staging the first successful revolution that inspired peoples from below
in the Atlantic World, Sprague, in seven chapters and a conclusion, examines,
illustrates, and analyzes topics such as “The Caribbean and Global Capitalism,”
“The Challenge of Understanding Social Formation in the Global Era,” The
Caribbean Cruise Ship Business and the emergence of a Transnational
Capitalist class,” Migration, Remittances, and Accumulation in the Globalizing
Caribbean, “Globally Competitive Exporting Processing and Exploitation in
the Caribbean,” “From International to Transnational Mining: The Industry’s
shifting Political Economy and the Caribbean,” and “Transnational Processes
and the Restructuring of the Caribbean’s Political Economy” (Sprague, 2020).
Brilliantly well-researched and written, Globalizing the Caribbean captures
the application of contemporary neo-liberal capitalism and its impacts on
the Caribbean region and how the transnational elites have imposed their
hegemony on all aspects of life in the region. From the 1970s to the crushing of
the Grenada Revolution to the sabotaging and dismantling of the Bolivarian
revolution, the Caribbean region has witnessed what Sprague has called
“Transnational processes and the Restructuring of the Caribbean Political
economy (Sprague, 2020: 251–252).

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2 book review

In the discussion of each of these issues, Sprague has demonstrated how

the collaboration between the Caribbean transnational elites and their coun-
terparts in North America, Europe, and Asia, especially China has made the
Caribbean a zone for extraction, exploitation, marginalization, and political
manipulation not only by their entrepreneurial acumen but through military
invasion, drug trafficking, money laundering, physical destruction of property,
ruination of people’s livelihoods, political corruption through capturing of
the state, subversion, destruction and hijacking of popular culture, co-opting
labor, and using the mass media to shape a neoliberal agenda that distorts peo-
ple’s view of the world where they see the transnational class as their savior.
The Caribbean is a region that has resources such as bauxite, oil, gas, gold,
silver, gypsum, and nickel. Once these resources became major commodities
in the advancement of first, British imperialism, and secondly, US imperialism,
the region saw a proliferation of multinational corporations that have gained
full ownership rights to the extraction and distribution of these resources.
With the gaining of political independence from 1962 to the late 1970s, some
governments in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Guyana sought to gain con-
trol of oil and bauxite resources.
However, these efforts proved short-lived as shown in Jamaica when the imf
imposed Structural Adjustment policies. While Trinidad and Tobago partially
nationalized the oil and gas industry, presently both are now in control of trans-
national corporations like bp. Noting this shift, Sprague points out that, “From
the 1980s and especially into the 1990s, Caribbean states undertook policies
to contract out and privatize state mining operations, which by the twenty-
first century resulted in local conditions highly conductive for exploratory
firms and transnational mining conglomerates” (Sprague, 2020: 282). These
collaborative policy measures have intensified as Caribbean governments seek
to attract more Foreign Direct Investment (fdi). These moves are also prepar-
ing the region for further exploitation.
In a 2020 report from the Economic Commission for Latin America and
the Caribbean (eclac) entitled Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America
and the Caribbean 2020, Alicia Barcena, Mario Camoli, Raul Garcia-Buchaca,
and Ricardo Perez noted that, “In 2019, Latin America and the Caribbean
received US$ 160.721 billion in fdi, 7.8% less than in 2018, a decline that is
seen intensifying sharply in 2020 when inflows are forecast to drop by between
45% and 55% as a result of the crisis stemming from the covid-19 pandemic.
(Barcena et al., 2020). While the Covid-19 pandemic has slowed down these
inflows, it does not mean that the level and degree of exploitation of labor
have diminished. In the age of neoliberal globalization, the Caribbean has
seen the proliferation of Export Processing Zones (epz s) that have employed

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workers, especially women, who are paid low wages and who are denied union
representation. While there is evidence that shows that epz s have provided
employment in the region, the author points that threats made to labor in the
region is appalling, and that the Caribbean transnational elites are consistent
in their allegiance to foreign capital and that their policies downplay poor
working conditions (Sprague, 2020: 209).
In addition to these issues, there is the major problem of the payment of
low wages that further exacerbates labor exploitation. In Stephanie Black’s Life
and Debt, that examined the impact on neoliberal policies in Jamaica during
the 1980s, epz s became a dominant form of investment on the island. Mostly,
employing women, the documentary highlights workers who sew 5–6 days a
week for American corporations to earn the legal minimum wage of US$30/
week (1200–1500 Jamaican dollars/week). Over 10 000 women worked in
these epz s under sub-standard work conditions. The Jamaican government,
to ensure the employment offered, agreed to the stipulation that no unioniza-
tion was permitted in the Free Trade Zones. Previously, when the women pro-
tested the low payment of wages and poor working conditions and attempted
to organize to improve their wages and working conditions, they were fired,
blacklisted and never regained employment again.
Conservatives maintain that “a rising tide lifts all boats” (Lowry, 2013) and
this talking point is repeated by proponents of global capitalism. They contend
that the capitalist system creates opportunity for all people. While it is undis-
putable that the capitalist system has produced an abundance of consumer
and capital goods, advanced technology, and expanded the frontier beyond
earth, thousands of people in the Caribbean have not benefitted from globali-
zation as Stanley Fischer, former Vice chair of the Federal Reserve Bank had
implied in the documentary (Black, 2020). From the 1980s, the Caribbean has
seen the loss of thousands of jobs as the region witnessed the implementation
of Structural Adjustment policies that wiped away the manufacturing sector
in places like Trinidad and Jamaica. Additionally, the transnational elites have
now resorted to “contract labor,” and “flexible labor” that has tremendously
eroded the wages of working-people. While the pauperization of the working-
class continues at a fast pace, Sprague describes the ascendancy of people
such as the Sabga family, Guatavo A. Cisneros, Michael Lee-Chin, and Dumas
Simeus who have become the one percent in the region and dominate the
political, and financial landscape of the region while their wealth, power, and
influence grow exponentially (Spreague, 2020: 3).
While I applaud the publication of this book, my one criticism of it is that it
tends to give too much agency to the transnational class in shaping of the polit-
ical economy of the Caribbean. Before the rise of neo-liberal globalization, it

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was the state in countries like Trinidad and Tobago that played the leading eco-
nomic role in the post-economic period, especially after the 1970 Black Power
revolution. Chaitram Singh argued that the radical revolutionary forces pushed
the Eric Williams’ government to the left and forced the regime to take control
of the “Commanding Heights” of the economy. Prior to this period, the private
sector played a very minimal role in economic development. While we cannot
dispute the centrality of the transnational elite since the advent of neo-liberal
globalization, Sprague (2020) contends that its rise came with the deeper pen-
etration of US imperialism in the region, and its willingness to collaborate with
the imperialists to crush all forms of resistance from below. The transnational
elites are nothing more than modern day pirates of the Caribbean.

Godfrey Vincent
Department of History and Political Science, Tuskegee University,
1200 West Montgomery Road, Tuskegee, AL 36088, USA
gcymande@gmail.com

References

Barcena, A., M. Cimoli, R. Garcia-Buchacha and R. Pérez. Foreign Direct Investment

in Latin America and the Caribbean, available online at https://www.cepal.org/en/
https%3A//www.cepal.org/en/publications/type/foreign-direct-investment-latin-
america-and-caribbean (accessed 5 January 2022).
Black, S. Life and Debt, available online at https://www.amazon.com/Life-Debt-
Michael-Manley/dp/B07GQ8R99D (accessed 5 January 2022).
Lowry, A. “President adopts Catchphrase to describe Proposed recipe for Economic
Revival.” New York Times (22 July 2013), available online at describe-proposed-
recipe-for-economic-revival.html (accessed 5 January 2022).
Singh, C. Multinationals, the State and the Management of Economic Nationalism: The
Case of Trinidad. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1989).
Sprague, J. Globalizing the Caribbean: Political Economy, Social Change, and the
Transnational Capitalist Class (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2020).

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