Abstract

Current consensus is that the rise of the Atlantic plantation system, with its brutal exploitation of enslaved labour, was important in the making of modern capitalism. Yet there is poor understanding of the processes by which the European invaders built the economic and social capabilities necessary to extract wealth from the Caribbean’s alien environment or capitalism’s related debt to indigenous technologies. This paper uses a wide range of qualitative and quantitative sources (travel accounts, government records, naval and Admiralty Court records, and probate inventories) to examine the production, and use, of dugout canoes and their role in local resource extraction and trading networks. It shows that, as Europeans adapted indigenous technologies, they were able to construct the economic and social infrastructure that underpinned the rise of the Atlantic plantation system, slavery, and merchant capitalism.