American Slavery, Atlantic Slavery, and Beyond: The U.S. “Peculiar Institution” in International Perspective by Enrico Dal Lago (review)

In this small but ambitious book, Dal Lago seeks to extend recent research on the comparative history of forced labor regimes, inspired by Kolchin’s pioneering study of American slavery and Russian serfdom.¹ Dal Lago reviews the ground covered by Kolchin but also widens the study of forced or bonded labor to embrace Brazilian slavery, African slavery, and Iberian societies with forms of bonded labor. The chronological scope of his new book is as broad as its geographical range. It begins with the founding of African chattel slavery in Brazil and Spanish America during the sixteenth century and concludes with efforts formally to end slavery in the Americas in the late nineteenth century. The analysis is grounded totally on secondary literature, as befits a study of such range. It has to be said, too, that it offers relatively little that is novel in terms of conceptual approaches. This book will appeal primarily to students seeking a guide to existing literature, not to established scholars of forced labor in history.

The story that Dal Lago seeks to tell pivots on the growth of international trade since Christopher Columbus and, more specifically, on the interrelationship between the European, especially British, demand for imported foodstuffs and raw materials and rates and patterns of resettlement, colonization, and development in territories and states that lay at the periphery of European epicenters of international exchange. Dal Lago’s approach draws implicitly (though at times openly) on a world-systems framework of analysis, but he also seeks to frame and inform his analysis by reference to other theoretical paradigms. Thus, at various points, he invokes the Williams thesis on capitalism and slavery, theories of Atlantic history, and Tomich’s concept of a second American slavery to structure his arguments.² Underpinning the entire work is an emphasis on the value of comparative studies for the furtherance of our understanding of trade and labor relations on both sides of the Atlantic Basin.

Chronologically, the book moves through the rise and expansion of slave-grown sugar, tobacco, and cotton in the Americas; and grain, citrus fruits, and other food crops in the borderlands between Europe, Asia, and Africa—notably, in the last case, the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate in what today is northern Nigeria. Among the unifying themes that Dal Lago explores are the economics of plantation slavery and serfdom, the nature of master–laborer relationships, and the capacity of systems of forced labor to innovate in the context of the changing international competition for goods.

This last theme merits more extended consideration in the context of the collapse of coercive labor regimes globally during the last two centuries and in the light of the belief, commonly identified with Adam Smith, that free labor was more efficient than coerced labor. Although it is an issue that is surely relevant to historical analyses of international trade and labor relations, Dal Lago almost totally fails to address it in any serious way. To do so would require a different, equally ambitious, but ultimately more rewarding and insightful, study of coercive labor regimes beyond Dal Lago’s focus on their internal and comparative dynamics, looking instead at the changing international cultural, moral, and economic context of such regimes from the late eighteenth century onward.