Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World by Edward B. Rugemer (review)

Edward B. Rugemer’s Slave Law and the Politics of Resistance in the Early Atlantic World compares South Carolina and Jamaica, focusing on negotiations in the master-slave dialectic: “the ancient struggle between the masters and the slaves” (p. 212). Rugemer stresses that the “endemic resistance” of slaves and the reactionary brutality of masters were two sides of an enduring political struggle (p. 10). He gives a comparative history of the trajectory of this struggle, tracing its origins in Barbados, and examines how it changed over time as it spread outward to Jamaica and then to South Carolina. He “focuses on active resistance, especially the organized violence of rebellions” and the political aftermath of such incidents (p. 3). The story he tells about each colony will be well known to specialists, but Rugemer’s comparative framework offers readers new insights into the development of North American and Caribbean slave societies, historiographies that are still too often separated, particularly in studies of the nineteenth century. Rugemer argues that Jamaican slave society became more militarized and draconian as it matured in response to the threat of slave and maroon rebellions, while in South Carolina there was a “domestication” of slavery, as the masters tempered the early brutality of their slave laws to rely on both “Carrots and Sticks” (pp. 115, 113). Rugemer’s comparison begins in the seventeenth century and ends in the 1830s, when slaves were emancipated in Jamaica.

More than most slavery historians, Rugemer stresses the determinative power of slave law as a political tool of the masters and as an agent of social change. For example, many specialists argue that the environmental conditions and the labor demands for the staple crops in each society best explain why Jamaican slaves never naturally reproduced and the enslaved people in South Carolina eventually did. A continual decline of the slave population was the norm in the sugar islands. Yet Rugemer suggests that the “amelioration evident in the changing laws” in South Carolina “helps to explain this difference” in demographics (p. 118). Rugemer’s emphasis on slave and maroon rebellions or conspiracies and the reactionary force of slave law creates a compelling, but perhaps distorted, narrative. As Sidney W. Mintz has written about sugar plantations, “only a tiny fraction of daily life consisted of open resistance. Instead most of life then, like most of life now, was spent living” (Sidney W. Mintz, “Slave Life on Caribbean Sugar Plantations: Some Unanswered Questions,” in Stephan Palmié, ed., Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery [Knoxville, 1995], p. 13).

In Rugemer’s treatment, white slaveholders were continually anxious about slave or maroon rebellions, especially in Jamaica; they were even “intimidated by their slaves” (p. 187). Yet, once again, this presentation of the master-slave relationship might not best reflect day-to-day realities. Trevor Burnard suggests that the idea “[t]hat slave owners were consumed by anxiety is a constant trope within the historiography,” and it is probably exaggerated (Trevor Burnard, Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650–1820 [Chicago, 2015], p. 267). There were certainly sudden, incident-driven moments in which masters, afraid of rumors of conspiracy or actual rebellion, made reactionary and brutal changes to their slave law, but Burnard’s assessment that “[w]hite men in plantation settings” were brutally violent but “were not easily scared or unusually fearful” leads to a more accurate depiction of the day-to-day realities of life than the story Rugemer tells (Burnard, p. 269). Perhaps more attention to internal plantation records and to the everyday drudgery of work regimes could have enriched Rugemer’s understanding of the master-slave dialectic. Richard S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), a long-term comparative study of Jamaica and Virginia, offers a rich example of how...