Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora (review)

Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom is both a professional and personal tribute to Barry Higman and his twenty-eight years on the faculty and as chair of the Department of History at the University of the West Indies, Mona. His publications—including Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (1976), Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (1984), and Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912 (1998)—are seminal works. In addition to honoring Higman, editor Verene Shepherd has two other objectives. She seeks both to draw attention to the increasing dynamism and interest in Caribbean history by showcasing a range of authors and topics, and to move beyond “microcosmic and nationalist” case studies to a “pan-Caribbean, multiple-theme” approach to the field (p. xi).

The first half of the book has four sections containing eleven essays. Section one examines slave economies, section two, the impact of technology on slave labor, section three, the ramifications of enslavement on race and class, and section four, strategies of slave resistance. Combined, these essays cover a wide range of specialized topics and include innovative work on the Caribbean and African slave experiences. A strength of the collection is the incorporation of interpretive differences among contributors. In section two, for example, Veront Satchell’s study of Jamaican sugar mill patents argues against the “incompatibility thesis,” which holds that “slavery impeded or retarded technological changes” (p. 93), while Kathleen Monteith’s subsequent essay is more qualified, suggesting that Jamaica’s coffee planters did adopt some coffee-milling technologies, but were slow to adapt to cultivation practices current elsewhere.

The topics covered in these sections overlap in many instances; Michael Craton’s discussion of the Black Loyalist diaspora to the Bahamas, for example, appears in section two as a study of economic life, but could as easily have been located in section three as an example of Caribbean racial politics and social change. Nuala Zahedieh’s excellent analysis of Port Royal, on the other hand, does not fit comfortably in any section. While her discussion of Port Royal’s early expansion, financed by privateers and pirates preying on the Spanish bullion trade, complicates the image of Jamaica as an agricultural colony, it is less a study about slavery, than about early urban development and piracy.

The twelve essays of the volume’s second half trace the effects of slavery from the era of emancipation into the twentieth century. Section five assesses abolition’s economic impact, section six, the effects of wage labor, and Indian and Chinese migration on ideas about gender and ethnicity, and section seven, the rise of grassroots political and labor protests. Mary Turner begins this half with one of the collection’s most engaging essays, an examination of the impact of the 1826 Berbice Slave Code on enslaved workers, particularly women. Perhaps Turner’s most important contribution is her contrast of this British effort with the earlier “fiscal” system established during Dutch control—one of the regrettably few instances in the volume where a direct comparison between empires is drawn. In part two, as in the first half, most essays focus on the British Caribbean, although four others do offer important counterpoints. Nigel Bolland’s discussion of the dialectics of resistance and James Walvin’s narrative on the effects of slavery on the development of British culture are intentionally general and comprehensive, Richard Goodridge’s study of women in northern Cameroon provides a second African case study, and Patrick Bryan’s essay of land tenure practices in twentieth-century Dominican plantations offers the only glimpse of the post-emancipation Hispanic Caribbean.

Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom achieves many of its goals. It includes a number of important, well-researched essays that broaden our understanding of how slavery operated in the Caribbean, and how it has continued to influence perceptions about work, family, community, and political participation. As such, it...