American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective by Enrico Dal Lago (review)

The question of Missouri’s admission to statehood precipitated in Congress one of the most momentous and searching debates in American political history. In 1820, South Carolina’s William Smith, a ferocious defender of states’ rights, rose to articulate the most systematic proslavery defense yet heard on Capitol Hill. He had peered into history and the Bible, he told his colleagues, and found slavery east and west, across continents, deep into antiquity, and, indeed, on the recovering plain soon after Noah had debarked from the ark to repopulate the world. Unlike Smith and other notable antebellum Southerners, however, historians in the United States after emancipation showed little interest during the next hundred years in moving beyond a national framework to investigate the not-so-peculiar institution in its various other hemispheric or global settings. Not until the tumultuous 1960s did the festering sore of race relations beget interest in the United States in fresh approaches, like the comparative method, that might help researchers track down the particular etiology of a painful domestic affliction.

Enrico Dal Lago, a historian at the National University of Ireland, Galway, brings a practiced hand to the comparative study of slavery. His previous publications include a monograph, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815–1861 (2005); an anthology, Slave Systems: Ancient and Modern (2008); and an essay, “Comparative Slavery,” published in The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (2010). The essay appears to have prepared the way for American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond, which Dal Lago offers as a jam-packed “interpretative summary” (ix) of slavery in the Americas through a wide-angle lens that scans more than the Western hemisphere. The book has two main parts, each divided into three chapters; each chapter has multiple subheads. Part I, “American Slavery in the Atlantic World,” sifts through the scholarship on slavery from a transatlantic perspective. Part II, “American Slavery in the Euro-American World,” compares scholarship on slavery in the Americas with that on forms of unfree labor in Europe. The result is valuable synthesis that charts the growth of comparative studies of slavery during the last half century; highlights their chief concerns and findings; and suggests profitable lines of future inquiry using the comparative method.

Dal Lago introduces the book’s two main parts with a sketch of key historiographical developments. He explores shifting paradigms and current trends in the scholarship, stressing the distinction between cross-national and transnational approaches. In an age of globalization, some scholars have questioned the appropriateness of a comparative approach by national or colonial units when powerful systemic forces that forged and shaped slave societies transcended such boundaries. Transnational studies have dissented from claims of United States exceptionalism even as simultaneous comparative analysis has determined that the United States produced in the antebellum South a unique slave society. Although Dal Lago mentions most of the historians and non-historians who deserve to be mentioned in the historiography, he occasionally speeds too quickly through issues here and in the two main sections to follow. He accords, for example, Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave & Citizen (1947) groundbreaking status in the evolution of a vibrant fifty-year tradition of comparative inquiry into slavery. Yet it was really Stanley Elkins’s Slavery (1959) and its connection to the historical component of the Moynihan Report (1965) that brought Tannenbaum’s little book and its comparison of Latin American and Anglo-American slavery out of the shadows. Dal Lago also misses Eugene Genovese’s acknowledged debt to Tannenbaum, who encouraged his Marxian explorations of southern agrarian social relations in a doctoral dissertation completed at Columbia University. In 1969, Genovese co-edited and contributed to what may be the first anthology ever explicitly devoted to the comparative study of slavery, a volume he dedicated to Tannenbaum. Dal Lago asserts that despite Genovese’s unflagging interest in comparative slavery, he “never...