Postemancipation Societies Research Articles

Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America by Elena K. Abbott

<i>Beacons of Liberty: International Free Soil and the Fight for Racial Justice in Antebellum America</i> by Elena K. Abbott

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts

The Things of Others: Ethnographies, Histories, and Other Artefacts

Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross

Reviewed by: Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross Felipe Alfonso and Paulo Henrique Rodrigues Pereira Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross. Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 295 pp. Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a comparative study on the interconnection between citizenship and racial subordination in slave societies. The book was cowritten by Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross and builds on their previous work.1 Among the many contributions of the study, it is worth mentioning the authors' analytical shift from slavery to freedom. In Slave and Citizen (1946), Frank Tannenbaum explained the divergent modern race relations in the United States and Latin America as resulting from their distinct slave legal regimes.2 Over the years, revisionists criticized Tannenbaum for overemphasizing law at the expense of slave agency, whereas recent scholarship have been trying to synthesize these two variables. De la Fuente and Gross draw on the latter approach but reveal a major blind spot that have permeated the whole debate. For them, "it was not the law of slavery but the law of freedom that was most crucial for the creation of racial regimes in law" (4). The book covers three and a half centuries in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana, locations that developed "successful, brutal slave societies" (223). This broad scope allows the authors to investigate the legal constructions of the Spanish, English, and French colonial enterprises, and to unveil how these structures induced the different historical paths taken by each society. Drawing on extensive primary research, De la Fuente and Gross demonstrate that the historical outcomes were above all conditioned by manumission and communities of free people of color, insofar as these factors resisted elite projects to restrict black freedom and citizenship and to associate blackness with slavery: "The larger the community, the greater the opportunities for freedom" (221). De la Fuente and Gross indicate multiple variables that shaped the differing trajectories taken by communities of free people of color in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. Yet they devote particular attention to the "mutual constitutiveness" (9) between legal traditions, politics and culture, and the agency of historical actors. In Cuba, the right to manumission was not tied to race, as in Virginia and Louisiana, because Iberian traditions mostly applied [End Page 327] the practice to the liberation of Christian or Muslim captives. Consequently, "communities of free people of color attained significant numbers in Cuba, while those in Virginia and Louisiana dwindled" (7). However, if the size of these communities were key to the expansion of freedom, how come slavery lasted longer in Cuba than in the United States? Although the authors do not address this question directly, one could infer from their rationale that the answer would lie in the vicissitudes of American sectionalism. By the 1830s, as a direct response to Northern abolitionism, Southern slaveholders started to articulate an explicit defense of slavery framed around the idea of "positive good," which helped enlist nonslaveholding white men in the support of a Southerner way of life. As white supremacy gathered momentum, the terms of black subordination were gradually reframed from property or status (slavery) to race (citizenship). Thus, while it is true that slavery lasted longer in Cuba, the laws regulating free people of color in the United States "also served as templates for post-emancipation societies seeking ways to keep black people in their place" (224). The book leaves research openings for scholars to further explore. How did black claims to citizenship differ when one compares Cuba (a colonial regime based on census suffrage) with the United States (a democratic, constitutional, federal, and representative republic)? Did the expelling of people of color from the Americas suggest the absence of a labor deficit in the United States? Has an Atlantic law, constituted by European legal traditions and local dynamics of American colonies, been formed along the centuries? By avoiding the traditional notion that slavery was the main social factor governing slave societies, the book to work as an alternative to formulations in which slavery is the...

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

The Impact of British Parliamentary Legislations on Enslaved Women of the British Caribbean 1780s–1800s.

Colonial slavery contained three interrelated aspects of law that transformed with the introduction of African slavery. Firstly, defining enslaved people as property, secondly, establishing forms of control over enslaved people, and thirdly, developing legal definitions of race, which distinguishes African enslaved people and their descendants from the rest of the population. The introduction of Imperial laws and their transplantation within the relevant island colonies had serious consequences on the enslaved persons therein. However, their impact on enslaved women was far reaching and resonated even within post-emancipation societies. Slavery remained an integral aspect of Western society for so long that its dismantling was not an easy feat. After all, it had been vital to European expansion into the Americas and was therefore deeply embedded into all resultant legal, social, political and economic systems. This paper looks at the introduction of the British Parliamentary laws of the Amelioration Acts and the Emancipation Act within the English-Speaking enslaved person holding Caribbean colonies. These laws were initiated to supposedly alleviate the atrocities of enslavement. In reality, the plantocracy used these legislations to create harsher conditions and mask cruelty which enslaved women felt the major brunt of especially as their health was increasingly compromised. Female enslaved persons' stories are often overlooked therefore, this paper also addresses the plight of enslaved women and tactics they used to protect their bodies within colonial enslavement and in the aftermath of its ending. Ultimately, the paper depicts what this signified for scholarship on the role of enslaved women within colonial Caribbean slavery as a whole.

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination by Amanda Brickell Bellows

Reviewed by: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination by Amanda Brickell Bellows J. R. Kerr-Ritchie American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination. By Amanda Brickell Bellows. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xvi, 304. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5554-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5553-6.) In 1955, Hannah Goldman completed a Columbia University dissertation comparing fictional parallels in American slavery and Russian serfdom. Thirtytwo years later, Peter Kolchin's Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1987) compared masters and slaves in the U.S. South with planters and serfs in Russia. Eschewing similarities, his comparison argued for differences: American slaveholders were more paternalistic than Russian landholders, while the Russian communal village (mir) was more autonomous than the slave community. Although erudite, the comparative approach reified the view of the U.S. South as exceptional. Over the past generation, scholars have increasingly compared unfree and post-emancipation societies to expand intellectual horizons, derive new critical inquiries, and identify compelling similarities and differences. Amanda Brickell Bellows's first book compares cultural responses by Russians and Americans to societal transformations wrought by abolitions of unfree labor. Six chapters examine different media comparatively: poems, novels, popular historical narratives, engravings and cartoons, oil paintings, posters, trade cards, ephemera, and other literary, illustrative, and photographic works produced by Russian and American authors and artists. The book's methodology is defined as a "'contrast of contexts,'" demonstrating how unique features shaped broader social processes (p. 3). Chapter 2, for instance, examines idyllic fictional accounts of serfdom and slavery in the post-emancipation decades produced by Russian noblemen Grigorii Danilevskii, Vsevolod Solov'ev, Evgenii Opochinin, and Evgenii Salias, and U.S. planter offspring [End Page 523] Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris. Their fiction employed similar literary strategies of abundant resources during unfreedom, grateful serfs and slaves, and loyal servitors. This comparison of Russian and American fictional writing reveals "unknown parallels" and "striking correspondences" in Russian and American landowners' responses to abolition, along with contrasting "racial considerations" in the U.S. South compared with their absence in Russia (p. 52). In the other chapters, the book likewise identifies "striking representational similarities and illuminating differences" in cultural production to make two key arguments (p. 6). Russian and American elites provided parallel portrayals of the past in order to maintain power in transformed post-emancipation conditions. The Russian post-emancipation imagination was "more expansive" because of the absence of racism (p. 7). The book's aim is to demonstrate the salience of cultural representations in a comparative scholarship dominated by materialist examinations of land, labor, class, ideology, and the state. This comparative study of post-abolition representations of unfree labor in Russia and the United States represents an important methodological contribution. Its attention to analogous writers and their works transcends simplistic parallels. One does not get the sense that the comparison is being evoked in order to further prove an existing historical interpretation. The rich array of cultural sources should spark the imaginative juices of specialists in Russian serfdom and American slavery, although whether they are tempted into comparative analysis remains to be seen. My two questions concern the comparative method. First, what is the efficacy of cultural comparisons when post-emancipation conditions varied so greatly? Bellows argues that the comparison of historical works revealing faithful retainers suggests that the romanticization seen in southern literature was not "unique" to the post-emancipation United States (p. 71). And yet this literature served the interests of white supremacists in the post-emancipation South with no analogy in post-emancipation Russia. We would have to await the advent of the Bolshevik Revolution before the peasantry marched onto the political stage to the same extent that former slaves did during U.S. Reconstruction. Second, there is a certain predictability about similarities of retaining power, and racial differences as cultural representations are marshaled ineluctably into both categories. It is not evident how each cultural medium looks different as a consequence of the comparison—one of the major objectives of comparative methodology. Still, Bellows's comparative work is to be warmly welcomed and encouraged...

CHANGING CHILDHOOD: ‘LIBERATED MINORS’, GUARDIANSHIP, AND THE COLONIAL STATE IN SENEGAL, 1895–1911

AbstractThis article focuses on formerly enslaved children at the turn of the twentieth century, exploring their contributions to discourses about childhood, labor, and stigma in Senegal's colonial towns. Drawing on records for over 1,600 so-called ‘liberated minors’, children who entered state guardianship after official recognition of their liberation from slavery, and on a variety of other sources, the article investigates both broad trends and individual experiences of work, mistreatment, conflict, and — sometimes — defiance. I argue that while many liberated minors seemed to accept their circumstances, others complained, disobeyed, or ran away, thereby challenging lingering stigmas and highlighting ways the state fell short of the anti-slavery and humane ideals touted by some officials. Attentive, insofar as records allow, to the actions and perspectives of liberated minors, the article contributes to the growing literature on the history of children and youth in Africa and to scholarship on post-emancipation societies.

Mission und Sklaverei. Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Sklavenemanzipation in Britisch- und Dänisch-Westindien

Mission und Sklaverei. Die Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine und die Sklavenemanzipation in Britisch- und Dänisch-Westindien

Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-slavery Jamaica, 1834–1882

Three years ago in a review essay, Trevor Burnard noted that the social history of the Caribbean remained a somewhat underdeveloped field. There is much that we do not yet know about demographic change, social structure, and economic patterns across the Caribbean—the stuff of social history—compared to the historians of other regions. Thankfully, the University of the West Indies Press has been steadily publishing innovative studies that provide the rich empirical data of social history while attending to the cultural and political significance of these findings. One of their recent publications is Jenny M. Jemmott's Ties That Bind: The Black Family in Post-slavery Jamaica, 1834–1882. In this monograph, Jemmott examines the black family in postemancipation Jamaica, arguing that black Jamaicans saw the ability to preserve and sustain their families as one of the crucial rights of freedom.Over the course of six chapters plus an introduction and conclusion, Jemmott examines how freedpeople understood kinship and the ways that they fought to preserve their family arrangements in the face of the stark socioeconomic and legal challenges presented by the postemancipation political landscape. This is not a demographic study, nor is Jemmott especially interested in categorizing or counting family units. Instead, she focuses on black Jamaicans' family values, as expressed in legal proceedings and other encounters with the state. When pressed by Jemmott, the archives are surprisingly revealing, and the sources illustrate the deep attachment and devotion that blacks had for their kin. Throughout she highlights “family advocacy,” the active pursuits by black Jamaicans to preserve the dignity of their families both inside and outside the courtroom (p. 37).The text's structure is straightforward. All but one chapter begin during apprenticeship and trace their theme through the early 1880s. Thus the text starts to feel repetitive. This is unfortunate, because within the circular structure are revelatory arguments and major interventions. The first revelation is implicit: the short apprenticeship period, the transitional phase between slavery and emancipation in the 1830s during which British masters and administrators were supposed to prepare the enslaved and themselves for emancipation, features here as a foundational moment. Between 1834 and 1838, blacks used the increasing freedom of mobility and expanding legal rights to assert their rights as family members: they found and reconnected with relatives from whom they had been separated, and they asserted autonomy over the fates of their children, all in preparation for full freedom. The second revelation comes in chapter 5, which departs from the structure of the other chapters and focuses instead on the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, a peasant rebellion brutally repressed by the British colonial government. By illuminating the devastating losses of loved ones that black families experienced in the rebellion's aftermath, Jemmott identifies the months after Morant Bay as another moment, like apprenticeship, when blacks rebuilt their families after trauma.Among the important (and connected) interventions made by Ties That Bind is Jemmott's rejection of Eurocentric frameworks that identify Christian marriage and the nuclear family as the primary indicators of a stable family unit. The commitment and devotion to family that blacks demonstrated throughout the period in question matter far more, she suggests, than Europeans' legal or religious approval of these relationships. Coupled with her insistence that Christian marriage and European recognition are fundamentally ill-suited markers for assessing the importance of family is her argument that blacks conceptualized family in ways that harkened back to West African beliefs about kinship and family organization. In this way, Ties That Bind adds to a broadening literature about continuities between African traditions and creole practices. This argument is integral to Jemmott's rejection of European metrics, and much of it is persuasive. Jemmott identifies likely parallels to West African traditions: extended families living together when possible, veneration of the elderly, a collective approach to raising children and political advocacy, and the embrace of fictive kin. Yet at times, the argument feels strained, especially at points when Jemmott has to admit that certain values were not unique to West African traditions. Finally, the book as a whole is a sharp rebuke to the stereotype that black Jamaicans—and especially black men—abandoned or neglected their families during this period. She counters instances of neglect in the archives with her own discoveries of men and women who went to extraordinary legal and personal lengths to assert the existence and primacy of their families. This is an important work that deserves a broad audience. It will be of interest not only to historians of the nineteenth-century Caribbean but to scholars of the family and those interested in the affective dimensions of postemancipation societies.

“Little Boats” in the Storm: Racial Ambiguity and Gender in Two Postemancipation Adoptions

Exactly what transgression Mary Ann Lamb committed is unknown, but adoptive parents, Loren and Nancy Thompson, considered them serious things we had to reprove for. Lamb, young black woman of about 20, had visited city of Kingston, Jamaica, to bid Thompsons farewell as they departed for their native home in United States (Thompson 1858b). They left behind and did not return for more than year. Perhaps Thompsons caught Lamb drinking rum with friends. Perhaps she flirted. Or perhaps she rebuked Thompsons for leaving her (Kenny 2010,192). Whatever she did, it clearly contravened gendered etiquette by which Thompsons, white emissaries of American Missionary Association in postemancipation Jamaica, lived and that they sought to cultivate among their congregants.In 1875, another daughter rebelled. Writing to guardian, radical Republican carpetbagger Albion Tourgee, nineteen-year-old Adaline Pattillo announced intention to withdraw from Hampton Institute, where she had been enrolled for four years. She would instead return to Yanceyville, North Carolina, where biological mother, Louisa, and sister, Mary, remained. Motivated by guilt and loyalty, Pattillo had decided to devote time to them. Tourgee had envisioned very different path for Ada, as he called her. Although Pattillo was born slave, Tourgee expected that formal education would provide middle-class respectability, and perhaps limited, gender-appropriate public role, joining white reformers in uplifting (Elliott 2006). Tourgee had moved Pattillo into his North Carolina home in 1869, directed his wife, Emma, to educate her, and sent to Hampton, with this result in mind (Elliott 2006; Woods 2013). Pattillo had other plans for both herself and blood relatives. do want, she stressed with an underline, in an unequivocal expression of insistence, a home of our own & I will not feel content until I get one (Pattillo 1875).Although separated by seventeen years and nearly two thousand miles, these two acts of rebellion reveal what was possibly common outcome of transracial adoption in postemancipation societies. Historically, family has been primary site in which racial and gender ideologies of its members, including children, are formed. The phenomenon holds true for end of slavery in Anglophone Atlantic (Scully and Paton 2005). Concepts of race in nineteenth century partly relied on notion that the filiation of individuals transmits from generation to generation substance both biological and spiritual and thereby inscribes them in temporal community known as 'kinship' (Balibar 1991, 100). Thus, disruption of this genealogical scheme by transfer of nonwhite subjects from black households to those of white reformers raises questions concerning how racial and gender subjectivities of freedchildren were affected.1 Transracial adoptees lived on cusp of two families, included fully in neither. By examining these arrangements from perspectives of children, adopters, and, where sources allow, biological mothers who sought to reclaim their offspring, present essay will show that result for children in question manifested in conflicted identities and an ambiguous sense of place within race and gender categories.The early decades of freedom provide fruitful sites of examination for these phenomena. Before emancipation, abolitionists frequently criticized effects of bondage on enslaved families (Dixon 1997) but had little to no power to directly intervene. Slavery's demise provided reformers like Tourgees and Thompsons degree of access to governance of black children that property rights of slaveholders had hitherto largely prevented. Moreover, adoptions occurred when racial hierarchies that many had once assumed stable were undone. Transracial adoption, Mark Jerng argues, was most common when national traumas focused on formation of. …

Julia E. Rodriguez (ed.), History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean Digital Archive (Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2010) (www.hoslac.org)

Julia E. Rodriguez (ed.), History of Science in Latin America and the Caribbean Digital Archive (Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2010) (www.hoslac.org)

Counterfeit Justice: The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne (review)

Reviewed by: Counterfeit Justice: The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne Sean Kelley Counterfeit Justice: The Judicial Odyssey of Texas Freedwoman Azeline Hearne. By Dale Baum. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009. Pp. 326. Maps, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780807134054, $45.00 cloth.) Former slaves in Texas, as in almost all post-emancipation societies, saw ownership of land as the foundation for a meaningful freedom. Dale Baum's CounterfeitJustice contributes to historians' ongoing examination of the post-Civil War U.S. South, highlighting the role of the law in defining the economic status of former slaves. The book tells the story of one freedwoman's effort to hold onto a plantation [End Page 101] which, had she been white, would probably have become hers with a minimal amount of legal fuss. Azeline Hearne was born into slavery in Louisiana in 1825. In 1853, she and her master, Sam Hearne, came to Robertson County, Texas, then a fast-developing plantation region on the middle Brazos River. Despite Azeline's race and slave status, she and Sam Hearne seem to have lived as husband and wife. The inner workings of their relationship are lost to history, but the couple did have a son named Dock. When Sam Hearne was on his deathbed in the fall of 1866, he made out a will leaving his 903-acre plantation to Dock, who was at the time still a minor. The will also contained provisions for Azeline's maintenance. Although the will was drafted and Same Hearne died after the Civil Rights Act of 1866 granted citizenship to former slaves (and therefore made them eligible to hold property and litigate on their own behalf) Sam Hearne apparently anticipated that relatives would contest his will. Sam thus went to great lengths to make sure his wishes were respected. Gravely ill, he journeyed to the county seat to have the will witnessed and he appointed a well-respected white physician to be his executor. He died two months later in November 1866. The rest of Azeline Hearne's story is a tragic, yet predictable tale of the legal obstacles faced by freedpeople in the aftermath of slavery. The story is also immensely complicated, a veritable tangle of legal maneuvers and counter maneuvers that resulted when Sam Hearne's white relatives contested his will. Dock died during the yellow fever epidemic of 1867, just after reaching the age of majority. Under the terms of the will, the property went directly over to Azeline. Complicating matters were various debts and encumbrances, as well as an old land claim dating to the Mexican era. Illiterate and lacking any legal training whatsoever, Azeline was forced to hire a parade of attorneys, some of whom were incompetent, while others worked actively to defraud her of her inheritance. Because Dock and Azeline were freedpeople, the Freedmen's Bureau took over the adjudication of the estate for a time, with the heirs' legal fortunes fluctuating with the frequent changes at the Robertson County Bureau. The estate was not settled until 1884, when Azeline's lawsuit against her former attorney, Harvey D. Prendergast (in which she was represented by onetime Greenback Party gubernatorial candidate W. H. Hamman) was dismissed on a technicality. Deprived of her inheritance, Azeline drifted into obscurity and probably died in the 1890s. Azeline Hearne left scant trace in the documentary record, and much about her life remains obscure. Her story emerges almost entirely in court records, with Freedman's Bureau and other documents contributing essential detail. Anyone who has worked with probate and property records will appreciate the tremendous work Baum has done in piecing together the story and making obscure points of law understandable. The book also does a fine job of interweaving the history of Reconstruction in Texas and Robertson County with a narrative of the legal maneuverings; indeed, the two histories intersect at numerous points. Most significantly, in telling Azeline Hearne's story, Baum reveals the formidable legal barriers to black equality in nineteenth-century Texas. [End Page 102] Sean Kelley Hartwick College (Oneonta, New York) Copyright © 2010 The Texas State Historical Association

Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History

The contributors to Beyond Fragmentation: Perspectives on Caribbean History have set out to address Franklin Knight’s description of a “fragmented nationalism” that has typified the Caribbean from the fifteenth century until the present. Knight’s challenge of an integrated Caribbean has echoed throughout the field of Caribbean studies as well as the emerging Antillean nations themselves since he coined the term in the 1970s. As the editors suggest, although the West Indies, to use a colonial phrase, were separated linguistically and politically by the empires that administered them, they share common themes of slavery, plantation agriculture, emancipation, labor movements, independence, and nationalism. The book is arranged chronologically into three sections investigating major themes: “Slavery and Emancipation,” “Aftermath of Slavery,” and “Colonialism and Decolonization.” The challenge facing academics working in the field is to integrate the region into larger perspectives. Thus, the essays consistently contemplate nationalism, imperialism, and micro and macro history, as well as race.As the editors note in the introduction, the Caribbean is a region in transition simultaneously searching to construct national or island-state histories but often confined to imperial studies. Moreover, the scholarship of the region — as evidenced by the imperialistic focus of the essays in each section — remains linguistically divided. One of the best essays, by Francisco A. Scarano, provides some reflection on the difficult task facing historians of the region. As Scarano notes, postrevolutionary Cuban historians had their “sympathies for the revolutionary process” (p. 38); Dominican historians during the Trujillo regime were “loath to discuss the slave past” (p. 42); while historians of Puerto Rico have “accentuate(d) the relevance of race for national identity and nation-building” (p. 51). Such problems have made it difficult to construct even a Spanish Caribbean history. Thus the political fragmentation of the Caribbean has been deeply rooted. The failure to create national or island histories has limited the ability of scholars to integrate the region into regional and global histories.Since Eric Williams’s pioneering Capitalism and Slavery, scholars of the British Caribbean have given considerable attention to Europe’s West Indian possessions and their pivotal role in the construction of the Atlantic world. Academics have focused on constructing economic histories or, as Gad Heuman contends, have “focused on the planter class and on slaveholders rather than on the enslaved” (p. 93). The major themes, as Heuman notes, have been the plight of women in slave and post-emancipation societies, as well as the role of free coloreds in Caribbean society, and slave resistance and rebellions. Bridget Brereton remarks on the unevenness of literature on the British Caribbean, noting that “recent scholarship has tended to downplay the significance of [the] ‘great break’ ” or emancipation (p. 187). And although Brereton and Heuman identify the unevenness of the historiography within the British Caribbean, they are less direct than Scarano in tying this to the influence of nationalism in that region. Nonetheless an imbalance has resulted as scholars have gravitated toward those colonies that obtained independence first — Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. This has directed scholarly attention away from islands like Grenada, St. Vincent, and Dominica, which were also settled by Britain. These later-established colonies probably developed differently than others in the British Caribbean.Beyond Fragmentation challenges academics to integrate the Caribbean more fully into both their scholarship and their classrooms. While the editors and contributors have certainly worked to accomplish Knight’s challenge, the literature that they must draw upon has unfortunately not yet fully matured. While today historians have been able to revise the assertions of previous generations and fill out the skeletal arguments made by pioneers such as Williams, the field is still divided along linguistic and imperial lines. While the dream of achieving a unified history has not been achieved, this volume is certainly an important step in that direction.

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (review)

Reviewed by: Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World ed. by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton Rachel Sarah O’Toole Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Edited by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. In this expertly edited volume, contributors employ gender analysis to argue that enslaved women and men underwent distinct emancipation experiences while gender inequities increased in postemancipation societies. Providing provocative case studies from the Caribbean, the southern U.S., and coastal Africa, the tightly crafted essays reveal how racial hierarchies, patriarchal authorities, and labor relations shaped the structures of slavery and the processes of abolition. If slavery denied enslaved women’s femininity and usurped enslaved men’s masculinity, emancipation included opportunities to express desired gendered relations. Bridget Brereton describes how freed married women and mothers withdrew from fieldwork while families enrolled children in school following emancipation in the British Caribbean. Yet, as freedpeople embraced a model of respectability with the woman at home and the man working for wages, ex-slaves did not copy elite models but rejected monogamous Christian marriage. Likewise, Ileana Rodríguez-Silva shows how freedwomen employed the Liberal rhetoric of gendered family obligations to negotiate domestic benefits including a private life denied to male workers. Yet, by bargaining themselves into the category of worker and employing ideals of domesticity, freedwomen “consequently eroded their political legitimacy as workers” (207) idealized as male. Adding to the limited choices available to freed women, Martin Klein and Richard Roberts show how a mostly female enslaved population achieved freedom in French West Africa by obtaining divorces and reuniting with their families. Indeed, gendered expectations of freedpeople and ex-slaveholders shaped economic strategies before and after emancipation. Yet, the strength of the book lies in the related arguments that the process of abolition radically reconfigured gender inequality in postemancipation societies. Sue Peabody shows how republican ex-soldiers in the French Caribbean reintegrated into society through their roles as husbands and fathers. The male warrior ideal became central to Haitian nationalism the as nineteenth century brought increased codification of separate gender spheres. Furthermore, social conservatism grew in post-slavery societies where elites and nonelites, whites and blacks, strove for a Christian heterosexual family structure that necessitated policing women’s public activities. Pamela Scully shows how emancipated men in the Cape colony (South Africa) gained citizenship and the patriarchal authority of manhood while married freedwomen lost the right to make independent contracts. Still, as Hannah Rosen indicates, discourses regarding interracial sexuality in the postemancipation battles over U.S. citizenship were part of white men’s resistance to black men’s claims to patriarchal status. Embedded in liberal ideals of freedom were imposed domestic roles for women with male head of household as Roger A. Kittleson and Carol Faulkner demonstrate how abolitionists mobilized representations of virtuous and moral femininity to present white women as the rescuers of slaves and the caretakers of former slaves. Freedom, therefore, was intertwined with new articulations of dependence. Most compellingly, the essays illustrate how race and gender were simultaneous factors. Mimi Sheller demonstrates that in Jamaica, freedmen reconstructed masculinity along with blackness to exclude freedwomen and indentured Chinese laborers from claims to citizenship. Even as Afro-Jamaican men employed Christian discourse of a patriarchal family to include themselves into British discourse of “active masculine citizenship” (82), they developed a working-class masculinity in contrast to “both parasitical white upper-class masculinity and dependent indentured masculinity” (91). Likewise, Sheena Boa shows how poor women seized street activities to subvert codes of “proper” femininity in urban St. Vincent and mock authority figures who attempt to regain public spaces by deriding poor women for inability to achieve European gender standards of propriety. Recognizing the hegemony of British moral codes, Melanie Newton argues that elite nonwhite men asserted themselves as public leaders through philanthropy that required “domestication” (226) of women’s activities in order to counteract white representations of free women as sexually transgressive. Further tangling race with gender, Marek Steedman employs a complex case of white violence against a black couple in postemancipation Louisiana to demonstrate how “southern white men perceived a threat to their own social standing in the ability of freedpeople...

Degrees of freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after slavery

As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late 19th Century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labour force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people - cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses and labour organisers - forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the 20th Century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and colour in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship. Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation: Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a trans-racial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences? Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skilfully observes the people, places, legislation and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation. Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in post-emancipation societies.

Unwanted Slaves: The Punishment of Transportation and the Making of Legal Subjects in Early Nineteenth-Century Martinique

Unwanted Slaves: The Punishment of Transportation and the Making of Legal Subjects in Early Nineteenth-Century Martinique

Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, and: Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912, and: Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, and the British West Indies (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, and: Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912, and: Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, and the British West Indies Philip A. Howard Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 198 pp. Fernando Martínez Heredia, Rebecca J. Scott, and Orlando F. García Martínez. Espacios, silencios y los sentidos de la libertad: Cuba entre 1878 y 1912. Habana: Unión, 2001. 359 pp. Rebecca J. Scott, Thomas C. Holt, Frederick Cooper, and Aims McGuinness, eds. Societies after Slavery: A Select Annotated Bibliography of Printed Sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, and the British West Indies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. 198 pp. After decades of research on the central characteristics of African slavery, the experiences of slaves themselves in the Americas, and the processes leading to their emancipation, beginning in the late 1980s, some scholars turned their attention to what happened to the slaves immediately after abolition. Recently published postemancipation studies have examined the social, political, cultural, and economic status of the ex-bondsmen and -women in Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, Brazil, and the British and French Caribbean. These studies have generally explored the position of the ex-bondsmen and -women and their relationship with members of the dominant European colonial society. They have also looked at the problems former slaves encountered because of race and class, and how they attempted to remedy their problems. Scholars' examination [End Page 146] of racial attitudes has illuminated the influence played by Auguste Comte and a host of pseudoscientists who sought to prove the biological inferiority of Africans. What these studies have discovered is that the former slaves continued to be marginalized. The majority have never been integrated into the political, social, cultural, and economic institutions of their societies. By dealing with members of the subaltern, and people who until recently had no history, the three books reviewed here make a balanced contribution to our understanding of what ex-bondsmen and women confronted in freedom from the abolition of slavery until the 1930s. More importantly, they seek to fill a gap in the historiography by illuminating how the former slaves themselves felt about their freedom. Finally, they explore how former slaves thought about the concepts of modernity, citizenship, and nationalism, notions that informed their attitudes toward their liberty as well as their status. Beyond Slavery and Espacios, silencios begin their examination by exploring the conditions, social status, and material life of slaves and freedmen and women before and during abolition. They next discern the changes that occurred in postemancipation rural society more than in the urban context. Beyond Slavery does this with three brief yet well-written essays on the British Caribbean, particularly Jamaica, written by Thomas Holt, a comparative study of Cuba and Louisiana written by Rebecca Scott, and a piece on British colonial East Africa, written by Frederick Cooper. The essays highlight the different forced labor systems such as the apprenticeship, indentured servitude, gang labor, and sharecropping that the colonial powers and elites employed in order to gradually replace slavery and to ensure that planters still had an adequate labor supply to produce sugar at a profitable level. How these labor systems influenced the daily lives of former slaves, plantation owners, and society and economy in general are also discussed. In both Jamaica and Louisiana they led to collective resistance that took the forms of worker organization, and work stoppages in the sugar-producing parishes. In Cuba, black exploitation encouraged Cubans of African descent to resist as well by joining the ranks of the revolutionaries between 1895 and 1898. But what both books share is the focus on what freedom and citizenship meant to the ex-bondsmen. Beyond Slavery examines this issue within the broader context of the former slaves' relationship with the colonial metropolitan government and elites, while Espacios, silencios is a micro-history of the postemancipation experience of black Cubans in Cienfuegos, located in the province...

Frédéric Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery. Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 2000, 198 p., £ 25.95

Frédéric Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery. Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, Chapel Hill, North Carolina University Press, 2000, 198 p., £ 25.95

From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery, by Seymour Drescher (New York: New York University Press, 1998); 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); Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial

From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery, by Seymour Drescher (New York: New York University Press, 1998); 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); Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial

Societies after slavery: a select annotated bibliography of printed sources on Cuba, Brazil, British Colonial Africa, South Africa, and the British West Indies

One of the massive transformations that took place in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the movement of millions of people from the status of slaves to that of legally free men, women, and children. Societies after Slavery provides thousands of entries and rich scholarly annotations, making it the definitive resource for scholars and students engaged in research on postemancipation societies in the Americas and Africa.