This essay examines the enduring structural continuities between the Caribbean plantation economy and the contemporary financialized development system. While legal emancipation and political independence dismantled the juridical foundations of slavery and colonial rule, they did not fully replace the underlying architecture of external dependence, surplus extraction, and constrained domestic accumulation. The analysis reframes the plantation as a vertically integrated extractive system whose core economic logic persists today through capital monopolies, debt discipline, external price-setting, and policy conditionality. It introduces the concept of the “financial plantation” to describe how modern Caribbean economies remain structurally exposed to external markets, interest-rate cycles, and capital flows they do not control. The paper further analyzes the political economy of seasonal abundance and cultural spectacle as short-term demand stabilizers within structurally fragile economies, and interrogates the role of symbolic institutional legitimacy under conditions of limited monetary sovereignty. The central policy implication is that true post-plantation transformation requires not incremental reform, but design-level replacement of extractive economic architectures with endogenous, regenerative, and resilience-oriented development systems.
