Guy Pierre, with the assistance of Nathalie Lamaute-Brisson and Gusti-Klara Gaillard-Pourchet, has done a great service in editing this book. It covers the period from the 1880s, when the sugar price was about to collapse, with devastating effects on the Caribbean, to the 1950s, when the Puerto Rican development model (Operation Bootstrap) was in full swing. Authors have been allowed to write in English, French or Spanish, with only the abstracts appearing in all three languages.

The first part on the sugar economy deals not only with the crisis of the sugar industry after 1880, but also with its recovery in the first half of the twentieth century as a result of the sugar preferences given to almost all exporters in the Caribbean by at least one metropolitan country. The United States, for example, admitted sugar from its Caribbean colonies (Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) without tariff and gave a 20 per cent preference to Cuba. There are chapters on Guadeloupe (by Alain Buffon), Trinidad (by Rita Pemberton) and Barbados (by Pedro Welch).

Yet this part of the book on the sugar economy does much more than tell a familiar story. It includes two excellent chapters (by Oscar Zanetti and Inés Roldán de Montaud) on the financial arrangements surrounding the sugar industry in Cuba. These two chapters bring home the complex webs by which the sugar industry permeated almost all aspects of the economy and society in those countries where it was the main export.

The second part deals with the impact of foreign capital and neo-colonialism on the two countries of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic). There are four chapters in all. Gusti-Klara Gaillard-Pourchet explores trade between France and Haiti between 1910 and 1940, when coffee was the main Haitian export and the US was supplanting France as the main trade partner. This is followed by a riveting essay by Leslie Manigat explaining in detail how this shift among the metropolitan countries took place. The two chapters on the Dominican Republic examine less well-known topics. Roberto Cassá examines the short-lived treaty of reciprocity with the United States signed in 1891, which gives excellent insight into the use of free trade as an instrument of imperial control, while Franklin Franco Pichardo shows how the Dominican Republic reintroduced its own currency in 1947 after nearly 50 years of dollarisation.

The third part covers banking and monetary systems. It will prove less interesting for students of the Caribbean, as two of the chapters are more concerned with the Kemmerer missions in Latin America. In the third chapter, however, Jérôme Wilson shows how a student of Kemmerer (Robert Triffin) played a part after the Second World War in reforming monetary systems in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund. The fourth chapter, by Guy Pierre, looks at how the monetary system in Haiti worked from the early 1920s to the 1950s.

The final part, called models of development, is mainly concerned with Puerto Rico. It tells the story of Operation Bootstrap and the associated transformation of the banking system. However, there is also a very interesting chapter by Fred Doura on export diversification in Haiti.

The themes covered in this book are important ones for understanding the contemporary Caribbean – in particular, the many chapters on Haiti are especially welcome. There are, inevitably, a few gaps, the most glaring being the lack of attention given to the rise of service exports (especially tourism) towards the end of the period considered in the book. In general, however, this is a fine work that deserves to be widely read.