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  • American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective by Enrico Dal Lago
  • Natalie Zacek (bio)
American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective. By Enrico Dal Lago. (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2013. Pp. 235. Cloth, $150.00; paper, $45.95.)

In 1956, Kenneth M. Stampp referred to North American slavery as the United States’ “peculiar institution,” but, as Enrico Dal Lago reminds us in the introduction to this survey of the history and historiography of unfree labor, nearly a decade earlier Frank Tannenbaum had inaugurated the study of American slavery in comparative perspective with his Slave and Citizen (1947), which analyzes the similarities and divergences between the slave systems of the United States and Latin America. In this volume, Dal Lago sets himself the task of “provid[ing] an interpretive summary of past and present scholarship focused on comparative history of American slavery,” employing a Euro-American framework emphasizing the interrelationship between U.S. slavery, eastern European serfdom, and Mediterranean forms of sharecropping (ix). The book is notable both for its provocative insights and for its missed opportunities. [End Page 301]

American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond is divided into two sections, the first consisting of three chapters that locate American slavery in an Atlantic perspective, and the second an additional three that place it in the context of nineteenth-century Euro-American politics and economics. The former provides a synthesis of recent scholarship on the origins and development of plantation slavery in the Americas, illuminating the ways that various New World planter elites created and managed this labor system and emphasizing ruptures and continuities within the cultures of the African diaspora. Centering his analysis on Brazil, the British Caribbean, Virginia, and South Carolina (but, surprisingly, ignoring Haiti), Dal Lago argues, following Peter Kolchin (A Sphinx on the American Land, 2003), that this region was home to “many souths,” due to the tremendous variation in society, economy, and geography across the colonial Americas (26). He moves on chronologically to discuss the eighteenth century as a moment of cultural consolidation among both masters and slaves, the rationalization of forms of agricultural production and the management of slave workforces, and the effects of the Atlantic revolutions on systems of slavery, particularly in terms of the ways in which these uprisings did, or did not, lead to significant changes in the nature of slavery throughout the Americas. In this section’s final chapter, Dal Lago introduces the Sokoto Caliphate of West Africa, perhaps the world’s largest slave society in the early nineteenth century, as a comparator to the United States, Brazil, and Cuba.

This last point is indicative of some of the problems in Dal Lago’s extremely broad-brush analysis of Atlantic slave societies. He notes “the essential differences that existed between the Sokoto Caliphate and the slave societies of the Americas . . . [primarily] the pervasiveness of Islamic ideology on the entire Sokoto slave system,” but claims that “it is possible to make a comparison with analogous phenomena of slave resistance and rebellion” between the Caliphate and the slave societies of the Americas (65, 91). His evidence for this assertion is that, in the former location, “slaves also asserted their particular identity through forms of worship different from the ones of their masters,” which seems a very slender thread on which to hang such a provocative argument (91). A similar problem occurs in relation to the much-debated issue of patriarchal versus paternalist styles of slave management, in this case in the eighteenth-century American South. Dal Lago asserts that, following the social upheavals of the First Great Awakening, planters altered their treatment of the enslaved and “created the premises for a better atmosphere in the master-slave relationship” (50). This is a large and controversial claim, in support of which Dal Lago offers only a brief quotation from the Virginian planter William [End Page 302] Byrd II. Of course, any work of historical or historiographical synthesis, particularly one that covers such a vast geographical and temporal sweep as this volume, is bound to deal only briefly with complex and controversial material, but one gets the sense that...

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