The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean by Daniel B. Rood (review)

Among the many monographs published over the last decade on the topic of what Daniel B. Rood calls “slaveholders’ capitalism,” The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean ranks among the most accomplished and significant (p. 2). This is not a study of the rise of King Cotton in the U.S. South, which, as many historians have been at pains to demonstrate lately, contributed to the British Industrial Revolution. Yet The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is a study of the Industrial Revolution. Numerous scholars have emphasized that plantation-based sugar cultivation was a “modern” industrial enterprise (p. 8). Rood has developed this insight with a new level of care. This book must be read by anyone with even a passing interest in its subject.

Rood’s interpretive framework is the “Second Slavery,” a term for the reinvention of racialized chattel slavery in the Atlantic world in the wake of the successful Haitian Revolution and the British empire’s gradual turn toward abolitionism (p. 2). Rood argues for the rise of a coherent “Greater Caribbean” during the 1840s and 1850s, centered primarily on Cuba, which, in the period after the revolution in Haiti, became the site of the most innovative sugar plantation complex in the world (p. 4). Linked to Cuba by circuits of exchange were two locations: the coffee-growing regions of Brazil and the wheat-growing and flour-milling areas of Virginia.

In the opening chapters, Rood demonstrates that the extension and intensification of sugar cultivation in Cuba in the 1840s and 1850s was dependent on creole planters’ capital-intensive technological innovations in sugar manufacturing, which allowed them to produce the white sugar in demand in Great Britain. Black slaves, some skilled, made crucial contributions. Rood is excellent in detailing the relationship between technological change and slave labor. He also shows that Cuba’s planters followed a familiar industrial script. They plowed earnings back into fixed capital investments in slaves and machines, increasing the scale of enterprise, driving out smaller competitors, and appropriating fresh lands for commodity production. A chapter also details how planters invested in railroads to get their products to market. Among the leading producers of Cuban railroad parts was the famed Virginia Tredegar Ironworks. Similar themes appear in the chapters on the “Richmond-Rio Circuit” (p. 121). To pay for coffee imports, American merchants sold finely processed white flour to Brazil. Processing was concentrated in innovative, capital-intensive, Richmond-based flour mills, where black slave labor was again important. Virginia slaveholders consolidated larger holdings in the Shenandoah Valley to grow wheat. One planter, Cyrus McCormick, developed the mechanized reaper during the 1830s, an important implement of the Industrial Revolution.

By tracing unappreciated trade circuits and common developmental patterns, Rood’s construction of a Greater Caribbean is convincing. He is too careful a historian to suggest that this complex was more significant than the U.S.–Great Britain cotton textile nexus. But he is right that historians of slave-based economic development must take the measure of the Greater Caribbean.

One takeaway from The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is that the antebellum U.S. South was somewhat economically disarticulated. The Shenandoah Valley was linked more to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, than to Mobile, Alabama. The growth of iron manufacturing in Virginia was, perhaps, more dependent on demand in Cuba than Mississippi. This insight helps explain some of the future economic struggles of the Confederacy to cohere as a nation. Second, if there are varieties of capitalism, including “slaveholders’ capitalism,” Rood reveals there were many possible varieties of the Industrial Revolution, including a variety invested in racialized slavery (p. 3). Rood suggestively argues that an industrial conception of slaves as laborers lasted in racial discourse long after emancipation. Important contrasts can still be drawn between slave and non-slave-based industrializations...