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

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is an illuminating transnational history about transformations in geographies and patterns of work wrought through changes in the production and transport of cane sugar and wheat flour in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The book's subtitle highlights the interplay of technology, labor, and race in slavery's reinvention as plantation capitalism expanded in Cuba, the Upper South of the United States, and parts of Brazil. The author sees the mid-nineteenth century as a period of crisis necessitating innovation by slaveholding capitalists to maintain and expand their positions in Atlantic commodity markets. Rood reveals "multicentered Atlantic networks" of producers and consumers, experts in industrial technology and labor management, and workers, both enslaved and free. In this book commodities, people, and knowledge flow south to north in the Americas, as often as the reverse, or across the Atlantic (2).

Rood's multilayered argument engages with multiple historiographies, offering insights across a range of disciplines and subfields. Foremost among the historiographic questions Rood tackles is the relationship between capitalism and slavery. Acknowledging "North Americanist scholars," such as Sven Beckert, who have revealed the centrality of enslavement and cotton in the US South to the evolution of global capitalism, Rood contends that this focus "has left important players in the shadows" (3). Before cotton became king, the elites of the Upper South, Cuba, and Brazil succeeded in forming networks and flows of commodities, labor, technology, and finance, creating "a new geographic hierarchy within Atlantic capitalism" (4). By narrowing the focus to a region he calls the Greater Caribbean, Rood disrupts the North Atlantic, anglophone bias of much Atlantic history writing. Havana; Richmond, Virginia; and Rio de Janeiro are the main nodes of these Greater Caribbean networks, not New York or Liverpool.

The work of Dale Tomich and others on Second Slavery in the Atlantic world shapes this book's attention to local and regional differentiation within and across national boundaries in the evolution of modern capitalism. By the 1830s and 1840s, the resistance of enslaved people and increased competition spurred efforts by Cuban, Virginian, and Brazilian "semiperipheral producers" to reinvent slavery, technologies of production, and infrastructure. In the process, they "reengineered their place in nineteenth century capitalism's global division of labor" (6, 4). According to Rood, these plantation capitalists extended slavery's commodification of human bodies for an increasingly industrial age, reimagining "the racialized worker as an element of a mechanized productive apparatus" (199).

One of Rood's lines of argument examines the quest for "whiteness" in Cuban sugar and Virginia wheat flour. Cuban planter elites sought to increase their share of the US market for white sugar by embracing a shift from artisanal to increasingly industrial processing of sugar cane. Rood makes a convincing and complex argument about el principio sacarino (the saccharine principle), the ideological underpinning of Cuban planters' quest for the best chemical, industrial, and labor processes to produce the whitest sugar (42–63). As Rood argues, planters' efforts to whiten the sugar they produced were framed by racialized ideologies about the supposed biological characteristics of Black workers that required careful management for maximum productivity and the search for "whiter" laborers, such as Chinese indentured workers, deemed more astute and docile.

For readers familiar with the scholarship on changes in Cuban sugar production over the nineteenth century, much of the information on the transformation of processing technology will be familiar. The sections on the warehouse revolution in Havana's harbor and Cuban railroad building by North American engineers and Virginia companies such as Tredegar Ironworks will reveal lesser-known connections and new insights. For instance, planters sought to circumvent both Spanish taxes and fees and the influence of enslaved and free workers of color on Old Havana's docks by building a new complex of rail lines and warehouses across the bay. Rood...