Beyond slavery: explorations of race, labor, and citizenship in postemancipation societies

Abstract

Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in PostEmancipation Societies. By Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. xii, 198. Acknowledgments, introduction, maps, illustrations, afterword, notes, index. $34.95, cloth; $15.95, paper.) Comparative history has promised much, yet delivered much less. The allure is great: contrast slavery in Brazil to slavery in South Carolina, emancipation of serfs in Russia to liberation of slaves in Louisiana, or the post-1929 depression in the United States to the Great Depression in Germany. Historical insights should abound. Unfortunately, spurious analogies, shallow analysis, and specious generalizations often follow. The three essays in Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies, however, fulfill the promise of comparative history by analyzing the crucial linkage between ideas and practices of citizenship, race and labor in the British Caribbean, Louisiana, Cuba, and Africa (p. 19). Instead of narrowly focusing on the burdens and legacies of slavery, these essays emphasize the challenges of freedom in bourgeois, liberal, capitalist communities. Taking their cue from Frank Tannenbaum's classic Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (1946), the authors broaden the context of emancipation and ground it in the dialectic of freedom and in the global connections that linked liberation to the inexorable demands of capitalism. Thomas Holt asserts that British emancipation policy in the Caribbean from 1838 to 1866 is best viewed not as a dramatic historical rupture but rather as an evolving conflict over the parameters of citizenship, labor, gender, and domesticity (p. 33). British ideology seldom corresponded to Caribbean realities. The British Colonial Office transferred the political debates over demarcations of citizenship that wracked English society in the 1830s and 1840s to the Caribbean where it insisted that the genuine liberation of slaves had to include broad political opportunity. Emphasizing egalitarianism and racial integration, Great Britain tried to remake the West Indies in its own image regardless of the wishes of the West Indians. By 1860, efforts to inculcate bourgeois values with respect to prosperity, citizenship, education, gender, and hard work foundered, reinforcing a British racism that disdained Caribbeans who could not embrace the good life offered them. By ignoring the islanders' visions of property, education, gender, and labor, the English tragically thwarted freedom. Rebecca J. Scott compares liberation in Louisiana and Cuba and argues that the contours of freedom primarily depended on the interplay of conflicting values and ideologies between the powerful and the newly emancipated. …