Abstract

Studies of Atlantic slave societies abound, but few discuss the technological capacity of slave economies or the skilled artisans and technicians who worked plantations. This lack stems primarily from the traditional view that slavery is incompatible with technological innovation, and that artisans, peasants, and petty merchants are politically inert. Jonathan Curry-Machado's Cuban Sugar Industry and Lyman L. Johnson's _ l Workshop of Revolution challenge this traditional view by investigating skilled workers in the slave societies of Cuba and Buenos Aires. Curry Machado demonstrates that nineteenth-century Cuba led global sugar production because its progressive planters invested heavily in modern and efficient machinery and contracted foreign technicians to operate and maintain it. Urban Buenos Aires had no plantations, but many migrant artisans—slave and free, of all races and ethnicities—providing for an ever-increasing urban population. Artisans participated in slave unrest in both societies, and played a leading role in Buenos Aires's 1810 independence.

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