Although today the Caribbean islands are not models of economic prosperity, during the eighteenth century they included some of the most significant and productive colonies. In The Plantation Machine, Trevor Burnard and John Garrigus draw attention to how Jamaica and St. Domingue interacted with the world and how world events shaped colonial institutions and prosperity.

The book's subtitle shows the authors (or possibly publisher) clearly want to connect their book to the newly popular History of Capitalism literature, but it is a strange addition relative to the canon. Like the other works in this category, they discuss details on slave treatment from the two brutal slave societies, but these stories are not the authors' focus. They do not use the stories to illustrate the human cost of slavery as much as they do to demonstrate the colonies' legal peculiarities. In fact, the authors explicitly distance themselves from the History of Capitalism literature in the book's concluding paragraph, “But we would not like to end on such a note, a tone of disappointment, as if the two colonies and the particular social and economic structures they had created contributed little beyond the immiseration of enslaved people to the making of the French and British Atlantic Worlds” (p. 267).

Rather than significantly contributing to the History of Capitalism, the book's biggest contribution comes from Burnard and Garrigus showing that Haitian and Jamaican history did not occur in isolation but were rather affected by world events. Most of the book focuses on how the Seven Years' War and the American Revolution shaped these two colonies. While other works acknowledge these wars in passing, Burnard and Garrigus recount these events from a Caribbean perspective and show their lasting impacts on the colonies' social, political, and economic institutions. The authors stress that while these wars may have temporarily harmed the colonial economies, after each one the two colonies continued to thrive. For instance, they argue that Jamaica's poor performance in the decade after American independence stemmed more from bad luck with hurricanes—which hit in 1780, 1781, 1784, 1785, and 1786 (p. 226)—than from any direct effects of the Revolution.

The authors' most fascinating contribution is exonerating Macandal, the legendary rebel slave from St. Domingue. In 1758 the colonial government burned Macandal at the stake for allegedly orchestrating a poisoning conspiracy aimed at toppling the planters. After his execution, slaves arrested for poisoning their masters were accused of “macandalism,” and his legacy as a symbol of resistance extends until today. Yet, Burnard and Garrigus present a convincing case that Macandal did not poison anyone and that spoiled food caused the deaths. They marshal convincing evidence—the Seven Years' War blockade's effect on flour prices and quality; that whites, blacks, and livestock all died; the timing and location of the deaths; and similar events in following years that were undeniably caused by bad food—yet because of Macandal's position in the Haitian pantheon, their case will certainly become the book's most contested claim.

The book's biggest weakness is a serious discussion on the demand-side factors affecting the colonies' success. As the title suggests, the authors focus on the supply-side factors that allowed planters to produce enough sugar to become the most important colonies in the Atlantic economy. Although extracting more from slaves through torturous management was a key element of productivity increases, the authors discuss the search for technological solutions too (pp. 246–248). But the supply-side factors cannot sufficiently explain St. Domingue and Jamaica's prosperity. St. Domingue, for instance, supplied over half of the world's sugar at the end of the eighteenth century, therefore increased production alone would have led to lower world prices, not the highest real sugar prices in 75 years (p. 242). As a case in point, when the Haitian Revolution destroyed St. Domingue's sugar production, prices sky-rocketed and Jamaican profits doubled (p. 249). The authors do not completely ignore the demand-side issues—they briefly discuss how both wars lead to further trade liberalization vis-à-vis North America—but a more substantial discussion of these issues would have improved the book's arguments.

Readers from various fields will benefit from this book. Scholars on the economics of race will appreciate its detailed analysis of the global and local factors affecting racial institutions. Anyone interested in the role of colonial institutions on long-run development should read this book—many of the institutional features the authors cover speak directly to questions in the economics literature but challenge the typical story that economists tell. And finally, while Caribbean or colonial researchers are obvious audiences, even European economic historians will find informative and new ideas.