The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery

Daniel Rood's The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery looks into the transformations of slavery in the New World—especially in Cuba, Brazil, and the US South—following the Haitian Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, and the gradual antislavery turn of the British Empire. It argues that the institution “did not simply drift toward dissolution” but rather “migrated to new places and incorporated new kinds of industrial technologies” (p. 2). This picture accords well with the view of scholars who describe such a transformation as the second slavery. Responding to a new moment in the history of world capitalism, plantation experts played a key role in this process, developing technologies suitable to the tropical environments of the greater Caribbean and the southern Atlantic. However, the book also stresses the contributions that slaves and freed people made to the development of these technologies, which revolutionized the production and transportation of plantation commodities across the Atlantic.The book is divided into seven chapters, accompanied by an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction raises the book's argument by placing it in the context of the second slavery studies and the creolization of capitalism and modernity. Chapters 1 through 4 examine the development of the Cuban sugar industry between the 1830s and 1860s and its impact on American “wrought-iron politics.” Chapters 5 through 7 look at the US-Brazilian commercial relations between the 1820s and 1850s. Increased US demand for Brazilian coffee created a significant deficit in the US trade balance with that country. US businessmen addressed that problem by exporting wheat flour to Brazil. Over time, US flour fell into the taste of Brazilian consumers, shaping the development of the US flour milling industry as well as the mechanization of the US countryside with the introduction of the mechanical wheat reaper. Finally, the epilogue closes the study by reflecting on how the “reinventions and perpetuations of the Second Slavery ensured that the legal end of chattel slavery would unfold within a longer Greater Caribbean philosophy that confused persons and things” (p. 199).The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery provides a detailed description of the technological changes in the production and transportation of sugar from Cuba during the nineteenth century. It pays particular attention to the new technology developed on the island by French, English, and local experts, such as the Derosne train, the Dumont filters, and the vacuum strike pans. The book also documents planters' experiments with different labor pools, including Chinese, and shows that the prevailing racial ideas of the time, expressed by el principio sacarino, shaped the very process of producing and refining sugar. Additionally, the book throws light on the role that US capitalists and engineers played in building Cuba's railroads and port facilities, including bridges and high-ceiling warehouses equipped with wheeled cranes. The book further shows that these capitalists and engineers were quick to adjust to the Brazilian demand for wheat flour, perfecting milling technology in the United States, creating containers specially designed for the transportation of flour in tropical waters, and charting new routes that reduced average time at sea by as much as half. The book's boldest claim, however, is that the beginnings of the US countryside's mechanization are associated with the expansion of slavery in the Brazilian coffee plantations.Although the book is illuminating, some of the important points that it makes remain unclear. Apart from the Cuban sugar industry, two other areas where slavery expanded in this new phase of world capitalism were the cotton plantations of the US South and the coffee plantations of southeast Brazil. Both are mentioned only briefly in the book. What kinds of technological developments did they engender? How did these technological innovations shape the institution of slavery? What was the role of labor and race in this expansion? Similarly, the transatlantic, let alone the intra-American, slave trade does not receive any attention. The transatlantic trade reached new peaks in the 1830s and 1840s, while the intra-American trade grew to an unprecedented size over the nineteenth century, changing the geography of slavery throughout the Americas. The steam-powered engine, along with other important technological innovations, no doubt played a key role in this process. Questions relevant to any economic analysis also deserved some attention: Was Cuba the United States' principal market for wrought iron? How large was the Tredegar Ironworks' business in the United States' wrought-iron market? Was Brazil the leading consumer of US wheat flour? Addressing these questions could have better contextualized some of the book's claims and findings. Finally, little room is given to either Europe or Africa. Such omission calls into question the very issue that the book is trying to address: to what extent exactly Atlantic slavery was reinvented or transformed. Without a broader framework of analysis than the greater Caribbean, this seems a difficult question to answer.The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is nonetheless a thorough study on the intersections of technology, labor, and race during the rise of the second slavery. It is a welcome addition to the literature and fits well in any course on the history of slavery in the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Latin America, or the Atlantic world. The book contains several figures, maps, and tables, a list of which could have further benefited the volume

Archaeology · Atlantic World · Capitalism · Context (archaeology) · Economic history · Economics · Economy · Empire · Industrial Revolution · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · World history · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · History · Law

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