Sociology of Modernization and Development

From the Preface In the early 1970s, when I first carried out empirical research in the Caribbean, I spent almost a year and a half in a small Caribbean village. It had around 500 inhabitants, 50 per cent of whom were under the age of 15, and its history had been dominated by the rise and fall of the cocoa industry of Trinidad, an industry which owed much of its success to the collective sweet tooth of generations of British children and the demand of British chocolate manufacturers for Trinidadian cocoa. When children’s tastes changed, or when there were improvements in cocoa refining techniques, the villagers were crucially, sometimes cruelly, affected.