Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850 , and: Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (review)

Abstract

Working the Diaspora: The Impact of Labor on the AngloAmerican World, 1650-1850. By Frederick C. Knight. (New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 240. Cloth, $48.00.)Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. By Jane G. Landers. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp. 340. Cloth, $29.95.)Reviewed by W. Bryan Rommel-RuizFrederick Knight and Jane Landers depict blacks in the Atlantic world as active agents who shaped the historical trajectory of the Anglo-American colonies. Working the Diaspora shows that labor skills and were important factors in the slave trade in the southern mainland North American and Caribbean Anglo-American colonies. Africans in the Anglo-American colonies were able to retain much of their indigenous culture and influenced the development of AngloAmerican slavery. Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions explores the history of Atlantic Creoles and their ability to use their unique skills to negotiate a better life as slaves and to take advantage of the tumultuous world created by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions to pursue their freedoms. Both books reveal that the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were critical periods in the history of slavery in the Black Atlantic, even as that institution came under assault during the Age of Democratic Revolutions.1Frederick Knight's Working the Diaspora is a thought-provoking study of slavery and culture in the southern mainland North American and Caribbean Anglo-American colonies. Although historians long have noted that English colonists sought slaves from specific tribes for their labor skills, few have emphasized the ways slaves were attractive laborers because of their African knowledge of tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton cultivation. In other words, Anglo-American slaveholders in the region Knight studies respected labor skills and that particular tribes brought to their plantations, and wanted them to transplant their culture to Anglo America. Drawing upon the works of historians such as Peter Wood as well as anthropologists, Knight examines material culture and traditional primary sources to demonstrate the ways slaves retained indigenous traditions and customs in the New World. Factors such as high slave mortality and the slaveholders' continued desire for particular Africans revitalized culture in southern Anglo-American colonies until the demise of the international slave trade in 1808.Knight also argues that slaves adapted their cosmology to life in the New World, especially as they understood the natural world. More than just transplanting labor and to cultivate particular staple crops, slaves drew upon an epistemology to make sense of their new life in the Anglo-American colonies. One of the longstanding debates among scholars of American culture centers upon the degree to which the slave trade emaciated culture. Some historians maintain that the slave trade and New World slavery were so brutal that they destroyed any vestige of culture, and the system of slavery itself shaped the black American experience. Other scholars argue that as brutalizing as the Middle Passage and slave trade were, certain cultural systems such as religious beliefs survived this horrific experience, becoming the foundation of a more syncretized and American slave culture.Knight clearly aligns with the latter argument. He advances this contention further by illustrating the ways slave owners were invested in the retention of customs. While historians such as Peter Wood, Charles Joyner, and Philip Morgan have also maintained that black slaves practiced culture and social systems in the colonial Lowcountry, their scholarship portrays planters as passive agents in this process, and retention was largely the result of a black demographic majority and planter absenteeism. …