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Hispanic American Historical Review 81.2 (2001) 425-426



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Book Review

Beyond Slavery:
Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies


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. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Index. xii, 198 pp. Cloth, $34.95. Paper, $14.95.

Beyond Slavery addresses the intersection of social, economic, and political issues concerning the concepts of race and citizenship, and how these are affected by the demand for and organization of labor after slavery. The three scholars, who each contributed a chapter and collaborated on the introduction and conclusion, are experts in slavery and emancipation in the United States, Jamaica, Cuba, and Africa. The central chapters are Holt's on British emancipation policy in Jamaica, 1838-1866, Scott's on race and labor in Louisiana and Cuba, 1862-1912, and Cooper's on imperialism and labor in Africa from the 1890s to 1946. This book does not summarize their research, but it is based on evidence they and many others have accumulated. It could have been better, however, if they had referred more to the historiography, in which the same and similar issues arise. For example, there are voluminous writings on postemancipation societies in the Anglophone Caribbean but, apart from Holt's book on Jamaica, only three studies are briefly mentioned in one note (p. 161, n. 30). Nevertheless, this book should stimulate more comparative exploration of the questions they identify.

A key question is "what free labor meant" (p. 3), how it was contested, and how it varied in different places. In every society where slavery was abolished new systems of labor control were developed, often involving legal contracts, the sponsorship of immigration to increase the labor supply, and the control of land in order to keep laborers dependent on the landowners. Cooper's depiction of British policy in northern Nigeria, "a policy of abolishing the 'legal status of slavery' . . . while hoping that control of land, patronage, and taxation would maintain the stability of a hierarchical society" (p. 118), was true everywhere that emancipation was managed from above. The end of slavery was coupled with new systems of domination in order to minimize social change. Other questions concern the social construction of race and how racist ideologies varied in relation to more or less rigid social structures. The meaning of race and the pattern of race relations, for example, were contested in the United States after Reconstruction and in Cuba after the U.S. occupation. Scott shows that this affected the character of struggles over work and political rights in Louisiana and Cuba, helping to determine whether the fault lines of collective action were defined chiefly by race or class. Race was also a major ingredient in the construction of citizenship, which is a category of exclusion as well as inclusion. Of course, the possibility of citizenship for former slaves differed in societies that were still colonies, like Jamaica, and those [End Page 425] that were independent, like the United States. Claims to citizenship also differed in societies where slaves or former slaves had played a major part in the struggle for independence, like Cuba, or in which freedom was believed to have come largely "from above," like Jamaica.

These broad comparative questions are linked by the authors to even broader concerns, namely the connections between, on the one hand, the ideas and practices of race, free labor, and citizenship, and on the other "the evolution of a capitalist system and of liberal ideology" (p. 19), and the persistence of imperialism. For example, the capitalist system and liberal ideology of the state, into which the enslaved were freed, are centered on the individual. This assumes a particular notion of freedom that has its origins in Europe, the freedom to do as one pleases, either within the limits of others' desires or even if it may restrict another's freedom. However, former slaves and colonized people may, instead, have held the...

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