From: Sidney W. Mintz: "Caribbean Society." c. 1968 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences.

The classic plantation was a politico-economic invention, a colonial frontier institution, combining non-European slaves and European capital, technology, and managerial skill with territorial control of free or cheap subtropical lands in the mass, monocrop production of agricultural commodities for European markets. The plantation system shaped Caribbean societies in certain uniform ways: (a) the growth of two social segments, both migrant, one enslaved and numerous, the other free and few in number; (b) settlement on large holdings, the choicest lands (mainly coastal alluvial plains and intermontane valleys) being pre-empted for plantation production; (c) local political orders excluding the numerically preponderant group from civil participation by force, law, and custom; and (d) a capitalist rationale of production, with the planter a businessman rather than a farmer-colonist, even though the investment of capital in human stock and the code of social relations lent a somewhat non-capitalist coloration to enterprise.

Social issues are matters which directly or indirectly affect a person or many members of a society and are considered to be problems, controversies related to moral values, or both. Under certain models of political issues, they are seen as distinct from economic issues.