Transmitted Cycles: The Metropolitan Pricing of Caribbean Wealth and Power, c.1640–2126

The Caribbean has never had a cycle of wealth and power of its own. For some 380 years it has been the balance sheet on which the Dutch, British and American cycles were executed; what has changed is the speed of the transfer and, at the hegemonic hinges, the metropole’s response time (four years in 1763, three months in 1940); the general lag before the order re-prices an adopted rent is roughly constant, near a decade. Treating Ray Dalio’s Big Cycle as a derived frame describing the metropoles — and the Caribbean plantation-economy canon (Williams, Best and Levitt, Beckford, Girvan, Lewis, Mintz, Thomas) as the primary frame — this paper reads twenty turning points from the Barbados sugar revolution to 2026 and finds seven recurring patterns, two of which (labour-regime substitution and external re-pricing of substituted rents) no Caribbean state has escaped. It scores Dalio’s determinants for ten states, reads Guyana’s oil-era indicators in reverse against seven post-2008 restructurings, and sets four scenarios to 2126. The governing lesson: ownership, not leverage, binds; debt is downstream of ownership; and the region’s only historical agency has been over the terms of a transfer, never the order itself.