Burnard and Garrigus set the two largest slave societies of the eighteenth-century Caribbean side by side and argue that what they shared mattered more than the empires governing them. Sugar planters in both treated enslaved people at once as workers and as unusually liquid capital, to be sold, pledged as security or hired out, an outlook the authors read as of a piece with the emerging mentality of industrial and financial capitalism.

Technology followed from that logic rather than resisting it. There was no reason to mechanize planting while cane still had to be cut by hand, but after 1750 planters grew keenly interested in anything that raised estate profits, and gang labour already made a machine of the cutter.

The pairing is deliberate. Rather than a formal comparison in the Tannenbaum tradition, which foundered on the difficulty of defining treatment, the book gives a paired portrait of two societies moving down parallel tracks.