New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison ed. by Jeff Forret, Christine E. Sears (review)

Edited collections come in various flavors—curated collations of teachingoriented chapters, compiled (and hopefully refined) conference papers based on a particular topic, useless mishmashes, and festschrifts that celebrate and comment on the themes explored by a senior scholar. Luckily, this volume, edited by two excellent scholars represents the fourth and not the third option. Although not formally a festschrift, this volume reflects on themes commonly associated with Peter Kolchin, who wrote comparative studies that examine slavery and emancipation in the United States, on the one hand, and serfdom and emancipation in nineteenth-century Russia, on the other. Notwithstanding their debt to him, the contributors to this volume also manage (as the title promises) to lay out their own agendas for future research and publication.

Like Forret’s chapter about violence and theft in slave communities and Sears’ chapter about Christian sailors whom “Barbary Pirates” enslaved in North Africa, many of the contributions investigate areas in which Kolchin was a trailblazer—for example, the idea that context is everything. As a case in point, Sears’ work argues that the urban character of a particular type of North African slavery actually stabilized the institution in certain ways, whereas scholars of North American slavery have traditionally seen city life as the solvent of bonds.

Forret explores another theme that originated in Kolchin’s work— the argument that ever since the appearance John Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972), scholars have been exaggerating the extent to which horizontal social links and shared cultural values were able to create a united “slave community.” Forret concludes that an extensive record of slaves who committed violence against, and stole from, other enslaved people suggests that life in the quarters was not founded entirely on trust or solidarity. In the same vein, though more theoretically oriented, Anthony G. Kaye’s chapter on the concept of “autonomy” in slavery studies continues his own critique of the “liberal slave” formulation, according to which Africans attempted to defend or attain rights that would enable them to resist nonconsensual social obligations.

Most of the chapters collectively make a case—if such were needed—for Kolchin’s abiding influence on the study of slavery in the United States. Witness Karen Ryder’s well-researched and clearly written chapter about slave insurance, which suggests that the depth of risk protection available to investors in human beings as property created greater risk for enslaved people. Similarly, Bonnie Martin’s excellent chapter investigates the extent to which enslavers were willing to mortgage enslaved Virginians in the nineteenth century.

The most impressive contribution, however, is Enrico Dal Lago’s piece about nineteenth-century modernization and nation-building in the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil, which brilliantly incorporates Kolchin’s directive that scholars should look at “other Souths” if they want to understand the U.S. South. Dal Lago views the independence and/or secession movements in these three contexts as part of a broad expansion of slavery that supplied ever-growing floods of raw materials to the Industrial Revolution. This expansion led in each case to the emergence of elite economic entrepreneurs who sought to replace old political formations with new ones to protect their power, wealth, and productivity. Da Lago’s discussion of the details that distinguished the strategies of the slave-holding elites in the U.S. South, Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul, and Cuba’s eastern provinces is especially elucidating. It is a fine tribute to the ongoing influence of Kolchin’s scholarship.