Worlds of Violence

That white planters deployed draconian physical punishments to extract labor from African slaves is not a particularly new insight. Scholars have long understood that brutal violence undergirded plantation regimes, and that an apparatus of terror served important social and cultural functions in early America and the new United States. Given the imprimatur of law in slave codes, physical punishments were daily features of plantation life, and they served to deter insurrection, maintain social hierarchies among white planters, and create cultures that were organized around death as a ubiquitous occurrence. Indeed, an understanding that plantation societies were violent worlds has even begun to seep into the public sphere. For example, recent blockbuster films—most prominently the Academy Award–winning Twelve Years a Slave—have offered moviegoers a less-sanitized view of the lives of enslaved people, one in which depictions of sadistic cruelty inflicted by whites have helped to undermine what is, in some places, a popular and stubbornly nostalgic view of the Old South.

Identifying the violence endemic to slavery is an important first step in coming to terms with America’s national sin, but watching the dance macabre takes us only so far. In their latest contributions to the historiography of slavery and plantation societies, Trevor Burnard and Terri Snyder move beyond cataloguing acts of brutality to analyzing the meaning of violence for white planters and enslaved people. Both depict plantation worlds in which physical suffering undergirded the daily exploitation of Africans and African Americans. Against economically vibrant and shifting plantation backdrops, planters and their surrogates deployed military-style punishments in order to extract obedience from slaves, and slaves themselves resorted to suicide in moments of desperation and resistance. But in Burnard’s and Snyder’s hands, brutality, death, and mortuary politics were not mere byproducts of the extremely lucrative early modern plantation system. They were the sine qua non of that system. Indeed, these historians not only ask us to see the dismembered bodies and to acknowledge the fact that for slaves a minor infraction could mark the difference between the quick and the dead, but they also demand that we contemplate the visceral meaning of systemic violence for African people and for those who brutalized them.

Trevor Burnard’s examination of violence is embedded in a broader study of the rise of the “plantation system” in British America between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries, a system that was characterized by “large-scale landholdings and slave-based labor forces; hierarchical and race-based management systems; export orientation; high-value per-capita output; and the application of scientific techniques of management to improve productivity” (p. 4). In a tour-de-force examination of three primary plantation regions—the Tobacco coast of Virginia and Maryland, the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, and the British West Indies—Burnard provides keen insights into the plantation system’s development over time, marshaling significant economic and demographic evidence to pinpoint moments of growth and solidification. His quantitative rigor, when hitched to this regional analysis, adds nuance and depth to our understanding of how plantation colonies evolved, particularly in response to global market conditions. Indeed, Burnard reveals that the plantation system was not static. Rather, it modulated in fits and starts, not only as a result of domestic pressures, but also due to external events, including military conflicts, recessions, and demographic shifts in Europe. This alone makes Planters, Merchants, and Slaves a “must-read.”

Atop this number crunching, however, Burnard has layered several broader arguments that point to new directions in scholarship on slavery and the development of plantation America. The first and perhaps most important of these is that the plantation complex became profitable as an economic model only when the problem of disciplining laborers—African slaves—could be solved. Crucially, Burnard argues that...