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  • The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean by Daniel B. Rood
  • Alicia Maggard (bio)
The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. By Daniel B. Rood. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. 272. Cloth, $74.00.)

Follow Daniel Rood on a tour of Atlantic slavery in the middle of the nineteenth century, and he'll take you to one of that world's largest castiron structures: a newly constructed warehouse on newly made land in Havana Bay. Railcars and cranes moved within, as did large workforces made up of indentured Chinese and enslaved workers who stacked and unstacked thousands of boxes of sugar. In Richmond awaited a building purported to be the largest in the United States, where teams of enslaved Virginians maintained thirty-one pairs of millstones capable of grinding out 200,000 barrels of flour per year. Many of those barrels were bound for Rio de Janeiro, where Afro Brazilian bakers preferred "sweet" Richmond flour and where slave-grown and slave-milled wheat was exchanged for the beans harvested from the expanding coffee plantations of the Paraíba Valley. Elsewhere in the Atlantic world, cotton may have been king, but in Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South, creole elites were systematizing the production and distribution of commodities not governed by the unipolarity of Liverpool.

Rood's brilliant book considers how elite slaveholders across the hemisphere deployed cutting-edge machine technology, storage and transportation infrastructure, and techniques of racial management to consolidate wealth and power in a system threatened by resistance, abolitionism, and the growing hegemony of European and Yankee regimes. [End Page 794] Contributing to the growing body of work on "second slavery," Rood maps the intensification of relations between the slave societies of the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil—what he collectively terms the Greater Caribbean—in the wake of the Haitian and Industrial Revolutions. Through careful research, he details how slaveholders adapted industrial technologies and racial divisions of labor to gain leverage in global commodity markets. For an audience of U.S. historians who tend to know far more about the cotton southwest, Rood recovers not merely different crops in different places but also different strategies through which slaveholders fit the plantation system to capitalist modernity. Innovations in how perishables like sugar and flour were processed, packed, and transported enabled more of the production process to occur (and therefore more financial gain to accrue) near the sites of extraction. Networks of exchange and knowledge built around shared identification with "tropical" climates, topographies, and captive labor regimes linked "semi-peripheral producers" and opened up new opportunities for them within a Greater Caribbean committed to foreclosing possibilities for peoples of African descent (7).

Rood portrays the Greater Caribbean as a region of experimentation and innovation, a place where imported technology was "creolized" to fit both the environment and the plantation complex. Following the Haitian Revolution, Cuban slaveholders moved into large-scale sugar production, and the richest and most technologically aggressive of them imported mechanized boiling systems developed for the European sugar-beet industry but modified to better serve the exigencies of sugar production in a hot, humid, and resource-scarce environment. Aided by investments in mechanical technology and their command of enslaved and indentured labor, elite merchant-planters moved to construct new railroads, wharves, and warehousing facilities to control more of the distribution and marketing infrastructure. In parallel maneuvers carried out over the course of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, Richmond's millers combined innovations in milling, coopering, and marine navigation with strategies of vertical integration to capture Virginia's wheat hinterland and become the preferred flour supplier to the expanding bread-eating classes of Brazil.

The developments taking place in different locales of the Greater Caribbean were linked as much by shared tendencies as by a circulating cadre of "plantation experts" (2). Veterans of Upper South railroad projects found themselves particularly in demand, sought as much for their [End Page 795] technical expertise and familiarity with mountainous terrain as for their experience managing enslaved workers. In the Greater Caribbean, however, white people did not have a monopoly on technical expertise...

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