This article was originally entitled ‘Writing the History of Youth in the Early Middle Ages’. My concern was to think about the potentiality of the documentary source material for the study of youth: narrative historical sources, hagiography, the legal material and so on. I found it in practice impossible to write about youth without writing about childhood, and in the end I found myself concentrating on the writings of Gregory of Tours: a proper title for this article is thus either ‘Childhood and Youth in Merovingian Gaul’ or, more honestly, ‘Childhood and Youth in Gregory of Tours’. I concentrate on Gregory not just because I am working on a monograph on this author, but also because, in the 880 printed pages in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica edition, he presents us with a very large body of material, covering both the historical and hagiographical genres, which also includes probably more autobiographical material than we have extant from anyone else in the early Middle Ages – not expressed with the sophistication of Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, perhaps, but rich and interesting despite that, or because of that. The advantage of having such a body of material from one person is that, although it might only be one man’s view of the subject, it may at least provide some consistency of terminology and approach. Understanding one man’s view of childhood and youth would, after all, be a start, given the startling lack of research into this topic by early medieval historians, and given its inherent problems.

The first question to ask, of course, is what questions ought we to be asking? What are the issues that we should like to resolve about childhood and youth in the early Middle Ages? We should naturally like to know if our own concept of ‘youth’ – which is itself highly subjective, extremely fluid at the edges and not very stable at the middle – had any corresponding concept in the period, or whether people in the early Middle Ages used quite different categories.We should like to know how adults treated young people, and vice versa. We should like to know about adult understanding of child and youth behaviour, and the extent of adult tolerance of it.

At the beginning of World War II, in late 1941, American concern over the safety of Suriname's aluminum ore led to the occupation of the Dutch colony by 1,000 US troops (Baptiste 1988: 115–29). The main fear was of a possible commando raid out of Vichy-held (pro-Nazi) French Guiana to sabotage the bauxite mines at Moengo in eastern Suriname, or even the blocking of the narrow Cottica River leading to the mines at Moengo. Accordingly, a small concentration camp near Paramaribo in Suriname housed suspected German agents and also German ship crews for the duration of the war. In 1942, three Germans escaped from the camp and traveled overland in an easterly direction to the Maroni River separating Suriname from French Guiana. Upon attempting to cross the river, the Germans were recaptured by the men from a “Bush Negro” village and returned to the Dutch authorities in Paramaribo (Sharp 1942: 14).

The black villagers who captured the German escapees probably were members of the Djuka tribe, one of six Maroon (“Bush Negro” from the Dutch bosch neger) tribes inhabiting the forested interior of Suriname. These peoples, who until very recently represented over 10 percent of Suriname's human population, all descended from escaped African slaves. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries slaves fled inland from the coffee, timber, and sugar cane plantations on Suriname's coastal plain to establish clandestine encampments in the rainforest.

A few hours inland from the Haitian capital city of Port-au-Prince, a black rural cultivator named Nesmère controls a three-acre plot of land. Like other rural Haitians, and like thousands of other small-scale farmers throughout the islands of the Caribbean Sea, Nesmère produces a combination of cash and subsistence crops. The beans, yams, corn, breadfruit, guava, and citrus are for Nesmère, his wife, and their three children. The coffee that he cultivates in the shade of the breadfruit and citrus trees finds its way into an international commodity flow through a complex local marketing system (Grove 1981; Girault 1985).

Nesmère, his family, and his neighbors are, of course, vitally dependent on their immediate physical environment for life and livelihood. So when Hurricane Allen ravaged the southwestern peninsula of Haiti in 1980, rural Haitians went even hungrier than usual, and some survived only because of food relief supplies from the United States. But weather hazards, including hurricanes and droughts, are only ephemeral events. The fundamental ecological problem in Haiti is its soil erosion. Too many people for too little arable land has pushed Haitian subsistence cultivation onto ever-steeper hillsides, creating an all-too-familiar vicious circle in which the land's capacity to produce is continuously undermined by the necessity to cultivate marginal slopes.

The Caribbean plantation is a global, not a regional, enterprise, and it has always been so. The economic historian Richard Sheridan, in describing the British West Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, points out that factors of production from throughout the world were united in Caribbean settings, and the unique sum of these introduced parts resulted in the Caribbean plantation: the original domestication site of the principal cash crop (sugar cane) probably was southern Asia; the labor supply and some food crops were of West African origin; building materials, livestock, and food came from eastern North America; and the capital, managerial expertise, and technology were from western and southern Europe (1973: 107).

The warm climates and virgin soils of the Caribbean islands and rimlands underpinned the production of tropical plantation products for the mid-latitude European market. This production was of modest scope under the Spanish in Hispaniola in the early 1500s, but it began in earnest with the English, French, and Dutch colonization of the Lesser Antilles one century later. The trade circulation of plantation products eventually was interlinked with the movement of global inputs for the Caribbean plantation in a complex shipping network often described as the “triangular trade,” involving Europe, West Africa, and Atlantic America from the Guianas to what is now Canada.

At the end of the twentieth century, and also at the end of a half millennium of external political control, most Caribbean societies have achieved political independence. The principal exceptions are Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, the French overseas departments, and a small number of tiny islands that continue to maintain formal links with Britain and the Netherlands. All Caribbean societies, whether formally independent or not, retain strong relationships with their previous colonial rulers as well as complex ties with the outside world in general through the necessity to trade and migrate. And all Caribbean societies, on the basis of location alone, remain geopolitically dominated by the United States.

The region's fragmented insularity, combined with its relative proximity to the North Atlantic metropoles, helps to explain why the Caribbean has been so intensely colonized and recolonized over the centuries. Beginning in the late fifteenth century “the Caribbean became a center of activity as direct sea mobility … was the key to empire and riches” (Maingot 1989: 259). In the centuries thereafter the region's direct accessibility to ocean transport and travel and the closeness of all Caribbean locales to the sea together suggest that a certain geographical inevitability may have helped to predetermine the Caribbean's long-standing colonial role in history.

The interest in the United States expressed by the Cuban slaves of the mid-nineteenth century was reciprocated by the interest that US slaveholders had in Cuba. To some Americans, Manifest Destiny meant moving not only west but also south (May 1973). In 1854 United States President Franklin Pierce authorized an emissary to offer Spain $130 million for Cuba, resulting in the famous Ostend (Belgium) Manifesto that declared the geopolitical inevitability of the US domination of Cuba. Some expansionists went even further, proposing an eventual “golden circle” of US slave states along the Mexican Gulf Coast, Central America, and then north through the Antilles, forming altogether an economic colossus of subtropical agricultural production (McPherson 1988: 103–16).

United States-Caribbean economic ties had, of course, predated US political independence, Yankee traders often penetrating illegally the controlled commerce between European nations and their Caribbean colonies.

If you were to say “1992” to a resident of the eastern Caribbean's Windward Islands (Dominica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Grenada), the reaction would almost certainly have nothing to do with the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's epic voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Rather, the peoples of the Windwards associate 1992 with their immediate economic circumstances. That is the year for which full economic integration of the European Community (EC) is scheduled. Accordingly, the EC's imminent economic coalescence, as far as Windward islanders are concerned, throws open to serious question the existing economic agreements that, since mid-twentieth century, have allowed bananas from the Windward Caribbean to enter Britain under preferential market conditions (Thomson 1987).

On the eve of the 1992 changes for the EC, bananas from the Windwards are not assessed import duties upon entering the British market. They are further protected by a limitation that the United Kingdom has imposed on so-called “dollar” bananas from Central and South America. Although Windward islanders are by no means wealthy, they have prospered in a relative sense because of these special trade arrangements. During a recent period when most world commodity prices were slumping, banana exports from Jamaica and the Windwards increased five-fold, from US $39 million in 1977 to US $195 million in 1986 (Elliott 1988: 10).

Most of the narcotics passing through Jamaica then smuggled into North America for the United States market apparently are distributed by a clandestine network of US drug pushers already in place. But, late in the 1980s, along with the increase of marijuana and cocaine brought from and through Jamaica to the US, a new breed of Jamaican criminal also has entered the United States. Joseph Vince, an agent of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, who is based in Miami, asserts that the Jamaicans are “the most rapidly growing organized (criminal) group in the United States.” Within a very few years, these Jamaican men and women – whose numbers are estimated in the thousands – have organized a drug-based crime network on US soil that has extended itself well beyond Miami and New York into the American heartland. During 1987, profits from Jamaican-run “crack houses” operated in Dallas alone were estimated at US $400,000 per day. The Jamaican criminal groups, apparently obsessed with brandishing weapons, refer to themselves as “posses.” US drug enforcement authorities attribute the fearless character of members of the newly arrived criminal group as rooted in the impoverishment of their home island, conditions that have given these men and women the attitude that they have, literally, nothing to lose (Cohen 1988).

The stereotypes produced by these Jamaican criminals distress the long-term Jamaican residents of the United States.

The US Department of Commerce's 1989 guidebook, entitled Caribbean Basin Initiative, provides thumbnail sketches of commercial opportunities throughout the Caribbean for potential American investors. Haiti, the black republic occupying the western third of Hispaniola, is described therein as a particularly appealing locale: “Haiti's low wages, productive labor, strong private sector, and close proximity to the United States have been very attractive to offshore manufacturers, especially in electronics, apparel, toys, and sporting goods” (1988: 55).

The guidebook is not intended, of course, as an academic treatise, and it would be inappropriate to use it as a target. Yet its implications about Haiti (and very similar comments about other places in the circum-Caribbean region) are clear and important. Haiti's “low wages” and “productive labor” are portrayed as local cultural characteristics. And the happy combination of these indigenous Haitian characteristics with the “close proximity” of the world's largest national market suggests that it is not only economically rational but also helpful to all concerned that US manufacturers send component materials to these undemanding yet productive laborers for the fabrication of baseballs, playsuits, and TV parts for the North American market.

An historical-geographical assessment of Haiti provides a less exuberant but more instructive perspective. Aboriginal peoples called the entire island Quisqueya. It was “discovered,” claimed for Spain, and renamed Hispaniola by Christopher Columbus in 1492.

Introduction

South East Asia's interaction with the wider regional and international economic structures has undergone frequent and profound change. Broadly these changes may be related to the successive emergence and dominance of mercantile, industrial and finance capital. South East Asia has successively developed as a supplier of high-value luxury produce such as spice; a producer of bulk primary produce, recipient of associated investment and as a market for mass-produced industrial goods; and as a major location for labour-intensive manufacturing operations and investment. Within the region these phases in the evolution of the world-economy have been reflected in the relations of production and the spatial pattern of economic activity. The progressive integration of South East Asia into the world-economy established the dominance of a small number of core areas and produced a pattern of increasingly uneven development at all levels.

The restructuring of the world-economy during the 1980s is beginning to open up South East Asia to a new cycle of capitalist penetration. Central to this process is the ‘new orthodoxy’ of development: the minimisation of barriers to foreign investment and MNC activity, the exploitation of ‘comparative advantage’; and ‘allocative efficiency’. These developments are in general contrary to the interests of the region's domestic capital. However, while in general the ability of the region's economies to resist the pressures for restructuring have been eroded, the process is operating extremely unevenly.