Abstract
Caribbean sugar mills were powered by water, animals, wind, or steam, yet the evidence indicates major differences between islands in terms of which mill type predominated. We suggest that windmills offered few, if any, advantages over animal mills and several serious disadvantages. Why, then, were so many windmills built during the eighteenth century on some of the islands of the eastern Caribbean and so few on others? Here, we draw on Costly Signaling Theory to help explain these patterns. The preference for windmill-building may have had less to do with functional requirements or economic efficiency than with cultural competition, the signaling of membership of the planter class, and the display of power throughout the plantation landscape.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to the following scholars for lending their expertise: Benoît Bérard, Ryan Espersen, Jerome Handler, Mark Hauser, Jay Haviser, Marco Meniketti, Reg Murphy, Tessa Murphy, and Emily Schumacher. Thomas Leppard, Evan Levine, Tessa Murphy, Daniel Plekhov, Krysta Ryzewski, Christopher Witmore, and Mariana Wolfner helpfully provided comments on an earlier draft of the paper, and we are also grateful to the two anonymous IJHA reviewers for their encouraging comments and suggestions. Historical maps and documents were accessed through the Danish National Archives' Arkivalieronline database, and at Brown University’s John Carter Brown Library while Rothenberg held its J. M. Stuart Fellowship (2020-21).
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Cherry, J.F., Rothenberg, M.A.W. Costly Signaling and Windmill-Building: Inter-Island Technological Variability on Eighteenth-Century Sugar Estates in the Lesser Antilles. Int J Histor Archaeol 26, 760–788 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00623-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-021-00623-6