The Perils of Comparative History: Belize and the British Sugar Colonies after Slavery

For comparative history to be meaningful, the phenomena compared must possess important and comprehensive unities of character. In his “Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838”, which appeared in the October 1981 issue of Comparative Studies in Society and History, O. Nigel Bolland accepts this maxim in theory; he ignores it in practice.