comparing emancipations

Comparing EmancipationsAuthor(s): Rebecca ScottSource: Journal of Social History, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Spring, 1987), pp. 565-583Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3788113 .

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COMPARING EMANCIPATIONS: A REVIEW ESSAY

The achievement by Afro-American slaves of emancipation from legal bondage has often been viewed in terms of categorical oppositions: slavery versus freedom, or coercion versus consent. Recent scholarship, however, has gone beyond these

oppositions to explore the development of postemancipation societies in terms of a series of complex interactions among former slaves, former masters, and the state.1 Moreover, some scholars have been concerned to interpret this process within broader contexts, comparing it implicitly or explicitly with other forms of transition to wage labor. In this essay I shall examine several recent works on the aftermath of slavery in North America and the Caribbean, and then

explore the possibilities for a comparative analysis of emancipation and of

postemancipation societies.2 The works to be discussed demonstrate that the analysis of emancipation can

be undertaken from several perspectives. Perhaps the most appropriate metaphor would be that of concentric circles, with different authors choosing to focus their attention on different bands of evidence. At the center seems to be a concern with emancipation as the "moment of truth" for slavery as a system of domination over individuals.3 Here relations between masters and slaves are the main object of scrutiny, and evidence concerning personal interactions is essential. The field of vision may then be widened to see emancipation as a shift in class relations, in which planters and other employers contend with former slaves as a group, and both sides seek new allies and new sets of relations. The role of the state becomes crucial here, either through its position as a mediator or through various forms of action or inaction that allow employers to reassert preponderant power. A still wider angle of vision reveals that a particular society undergoing the transition to free labor is situated in a world economy, and its competitive position in that economy may be seen as constraining former masters, former slaves, and the state. In this context, emancipation itself becomes less salient, while the

reorganization of labor that accompanies it emerges as part of a larger transformation of the productive process. A broad range of evidence concerning work processes, markets, and competition among producers thus becomes relevant.

One might see the first circle of analysis as an examination of the end of slavery as a social formation, the second as an examination of a transformation in the mode of production, and the third as an examination of the place of a given society in the world system. Using such labels to identify different types of analysis may in some respects be accurate, but each of these terminologies ? social

formation, mode of production, world system ? tends to reflect an exclusive

preoccupation with a single way of viewing the transition, and as such may predispose to a kind of reductionism. One of my purposes in this essay will be to suggest that these three general perspectives ? individual, class, and global ? should not be seen either as hierarchical or as exclusive.



566 journal of social history

The image of concentric circles, rather than a hierarchical image of levels, is intended to avoid the implication that any one of these perspectives is analytically more profound than the others. Each outer band surrounds but does not comprise the inner ones, and one cannot infer from an analysis of the evidence in one band the contents of the others. Thus no single band can provide an explanation of the whole phenomenon. (An exclusive focus on international market relations, for example, while reflecting a broad explanatory perspective, may result in an

analysis that is quite narrow, precisely because it cannot capture crucial determinants of social action ? including market behavior ? that lie closer to the center.) The most fruitful analyses will combine elements from each, but not

simply by juxtaposing them. What is needed is to see these elements in their

respective settings, revealing how they give shape to one another. I do not propose rigidly to categorize the works under review within this schema;

rather, I will appeal to it at certain points to help locate the contributions (and limitations) of each study. Such a schema may also help to indicate the directions that future analyses ? particularly comparative analyses ? might take in order to integrate the study of emancipation with other concerns of political and social

history.

Leon Litwack's Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery reflects a

continuing fascination of North American scholars with the interpersonal aspects of relations between master and slave, and with the heavy weight of ambivalence,

deception, and self-deception they seem, inescapably, to have carried. A moving, eloquent volume, Been in the Storm provides a picture of emancipation drawn from the experiences of numerous freed slaves, grouping those experiences primarily around themes of personal confrontation and adaptation. Perhaps as a reaction against the long-standing racism that refused to acknowledge the dignity of the former slaves' experience, and against a scholarship that tried to deduce a single "slave personality," Litwack provides a celebration of humanity and

diversity. Memoirs, private correspondence, the WPA slave narratives, and journalistic

accounts provide Litwack with an audible voice for former slaves, though it is

often one overlaid with clumsy transliteration of dialect by contemporary white

observers, or dramatization by former owners recalling the words of their former slaves. These sources are rich in names, dates, confrontations, accusations, and

memories; they are somewhat less rich in details of work life, wages, land

transactions, and shifting government policies. Litwack complements these materials with evidence selected from missionary archives and the records of the Freedmen's Bureau, and with a careful reading of such newspapers as the New Orleans Tribune, the forthright organ of a remarkable free urban population of

color. He sketches the conflicts over work and wages that emerged with

emancipation, and the efforts of both Northerners and freedmen to expand church activities and promote education. Finally, he reviews the proceedings of the various conventions of freedmen and their place in an evolving political consciousness. But his emphasis remains primarily on interactions between former masters and former slaves during the Civil War and immediately following emancipation. In terms of our earlier schema, he is concerned almost exclusively



COMPARING EMANCIPATIONS 567

with the crisis of a system of domination, and he returns again and again to

the central, individual, moment of truth. If one is to locate a major interpretive theme in Been in the Storm, it seems

to be one concerning knowing and intimacy. For all their conviction that they "knew" their slaves, Litwack argues, masters had to face the fact that they could not predict their slaves* actions once emancipation became a real possibility. Slaveowners thus found themselves trapped in contradictory anticipations of both

loyalty and insurrection. By contrast, for all their isolation, illiteracy, and apparent diffidence, slaves did in fact know their masters well, and often anticipated the behavior of Southern whites with painful accuracy. The drastic asymmetries of

power that characterized slavery seem to have inhibited certain forms of learning and observation by masters. Thus even though masters generally regained considerable effective power after emancipation, a contrary reality had intruded to challenge what they imagined to be the truth about those who had been their slaves.

Some reviewers have faulted Litwack for what they see as a failure to generalize. But the book in fact contains numerous generalizations ? often speculative, but

suggestive ? about fears, reactions, feelings, and personal calculations. Claims

concerning how people in different situations reacted to emancipation abound in this work; what is lacking is an attempt to discern overall patterns of behavior. Litwack's method is one of total immersion in a multiplicity of sources, followed

by empathetic and projective reconstruction of felt experience. This yields high drama, but only a limited amount of structural analysis.

For scholars wishing to draw out regional differences or assess differing economic

adjustments to emancipation, Litwack's account may thus be too kaleidoscopic. Litwack is surely right to resist simplifications of the postemancipation experience. But the use of organizing principles to draw out connections between circumstances and responses need not lead to homogenization, and could move us beyond the exclusive focus on relations of domination. As a first step, one

might sort experiences and outcomes by region, crop, and timing of emancipation, in an effort to identify characteristics of groups as well as the range of behavior of individuals.

Litwack's study does suggest several comparative questions. Faced with such rich documentation on perceptions and responses, one wonders whether slavery and emancipation perhaps had an emotional meaning for white people in the United States that was more intense than, or at least different in form from, that found among slaveowners elsewhere. If so, what were the roots of this

intensity, and what were its consequences ? for ideology, for race relations, and for postemancipation adaptations? Second, there is abundant evidence that former slaveholders in the South frequently sought annual contracts, often tied to shares rather than money wages, with which to bind those who had recently been their slaves. One might ask why planters in other societies ? particularly sugar-growing areas ? often eschewed annual contracts, seeking to economize by offering highly intermittent, seasonal work. Perhaps the two questions are connected: Were annual contracts an economic necessity in the South, or did they reflect in part a desire by planters to reassert a thoroughgoing mastery over lives as well as labor?4 Gerald Jaynes, an economist, has recently suggested the term "market




paternalism" to describe the system that Southern planters initially sought, and has explored some of the reasons for their preferences, including a shortage of credit and a desire to exercise "guardianship."5 It would be useful to explore this

process further, examining the ideologies, expectations, and financial solvency of planters in different settings, and the patterns of labor use and forms of payment that they attempted to introduce.

Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, edited by the members ofthe Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, examines the personal turmoil that characterized the period of emancipation, while at the same time ordering its evidence in a way that reflects a more systematic analysis of the shift from slavery to freedom, This collection of documents written by, for, and about freedpeople in the United States gives a different voice to lost

actors, one that is filtered through the idiosyncratic spelling of the newly literate and the formality of bureaucratic correspondence rather than through the literary

pretenses of white journalists and diary-writers. Moreover, the nature of the

surviving records enables one to trace multiple accounts of the same set of events, and permits careful reconstruction of regional differences and their consequences.

By any measure, Freedom: A Documentary History is a remarkable project. When

complete, it will provide the raw material and preliminary analysis for an

understanding of emancipation in the United States that is at once empirically sounder and theoretically more sophisticated than would have seemed possible even a few years ago. By systematically mining the vast records of the Freedmen's

Bureau, along with other holdings of the National Archives, subjecting the selected documents to scrupulous editing and commentary, and then grouping and analyzing them in ways that reflect on multiple aspects of the transition to freedom, the editors are providing for scholars of the United States an

unmatched resource ? and thereby a challenge. The first volume of the multivolume series to appear, numbered Series II of

a projected five, and edited by Ira Berlin, Joseph Reidy and Leslie Rowland, addresses the black military experience. The topic might initially seem less central to emancipation than the more familiar subjects of land, labor, and suffrage. But examination of the conflicts over recruitment, pay, and military deployment, and of the consequences for family members and others still enslaved, all expand our understanding of emancipation. Black soldiers stood at a point of intersection between the state and society, and between slavery and freedom. Their grievances, testimonies, and experiences as part of a liberating army highlight conflicts that would have to be resolved ? or by-passed ? as Union policies evolved toward full emancipation.

Letters and affidavits from former slaves are often quite stark in their depiction of events. At the same time, they reflect the complex issues facing those who

sought to join the Union Army in the face of unequal treatment and uncertain

guarantees for their families. It is difficult to imagine testimony that would convey more vividly the price those family members paid for their kinsmen's service than the documents collected in Chapter 4, Series II, of Freedom. Here is a portion of an affidavit by the widow of a black soldier from Kentucky:

About three weeks after my husband enlisted a Company of Colored Soldiers passed our house and I was there in the garden and looked at them as they passed. My




master had been watching me and when the soldiers had gone I went into the kitchen. My master followed me and Knocked me to the floor senseless saying as he did so, "\bu have been looking at them darned Nigger Soldiers." When I recovered

my senses he beat me with a cowhide. When my husband was Killed my master

whipped me severely saying my husband had gone into the army to fight against white folks and he my master would let me know that I was foolish to let my husband

go he would "take it out of my back," he would "Kill me by picemeal" and he hoped "that the last one of the nigger soldiers would be Killed...

The sense of betrayal expressed by this woman's master seems again to reflect the intensely personal quality of emancipation in the United States, and the document invites comparison with the way masters elsewhere responded to the

challenge of dealing with soldiers who had been their slaves.7 The story ofthe black military experience contrasts the personalized authority

that characterized slavery with the relative impersonality of military authority, military law, and military responsibility. At the same time, the extensive and

galling mistreatment of black soldiers at the hands of their own government and, in many cases, their own officers, provoked new forms of challenge. One group of Louisiana soldiers, imprisoned for stacking their arms in front of their captain's tent and refusing further duty until they received better treatment, stated their

expectations bluntly: "There is no set of Men More willing to serve the United States Than ourselves & we intended to fight for The country expecting to be

treated as human beings." Two of the group's leaders were executed; the rest were

imprisoned at hard labor.8 In confronting military justice, black soldiers thus learned both about the mechanisms of petition and appeal, and about the harshness of "impersonar repression within a profoundly racist structure.

The approach taken by the editors of Freedom: A Documentary History, then, tends to expand the interpretive focus beyond the immediate interaction of slaves and masters. It calls attention as well to the important relationships between black soldiers on the one hand and, on the other, recruiters, black noncommissioned officers, white commanding officers, federal civilian authorities, and the residents of various communities. These relationships provide as rich a source of drama as the central master/slave relationship explored by Litwack. The evolution of racial attitudes among some white commanding officers offers an unexpected instance of the unlearning of certain aspects of racism. The

ambiguous role of black noncommissioned officers in the face of mistreatment of their men by white officers offers parallels to ? but also important differences from ? the situation facing slaves given managerial responsibility on plantations. The continuing struggle with civilian authorities over the humiliating discrepancies in pay between white and black soldiers reveals the capacity of newly freed men for collective action and the capacity of their superiors for repeated temporizing.

One of the most striking features of Freedom: A Documentary History is the editors* ability to bring regional differences into focus without abandoning interpretive unity. Black recruitment, for example, almost invariably created conflict between the federal government and slaveholders, but the form that conflict took differed in the border states, the long-occupied areas of the

Confederacy, and the areas of continuing military engagement. 'fet recruitment




was everywhere a solvent of the social relations of slavery, and at the same time an exacerbator of tensions between slaveholders and nonslaveholders, and between federal and local authorities. The dynamic, particularly in the border

states, had its ironies: the need for soldiers encouraged the recruitment of slaves and the desire to be free encouraged slave enlistment, hastening a wider policy of emancipation; but emancipation, once achieved, tended to slow enlistment.9

The analysis in Freedom: A Documentary History highlights the importance of the border states in both the black military experience and the process of

emancipation. Barbara Fields, in Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground:

Maryland during the Nineteenth Century, carefully examines a single border state within the larger context of slavery, war, and politics. The first four chapters of her monograph discuss rural and urban slavery in Maryland, and analyze the

particular ambiguities of a slave system that coexisted with extensive free black labor and that came under exceptional stress during a period of economic

stagnation. In chapter five, her account of the breakdown of slavery in Maryland during the Civil War weaves together national politics, local politics, military strategy, slaveholders' evasions, and slaves' initiatives. Fields sees the collapse of

slavery in Maryland as essentially "a moral and political phenomenon, arising from the slaves' daily more vivid perception that their owners were no longer sovereign." She does not fail to enjoy the spectacle:

Observers marveled at the arbitrariness with which loyal and disloyai, benevolent and malevolent owners alike lost their slaves. It was rare moment of poetic justice. Slaveowners experienced briefly, in milder form, the anguish with which slaves had been forced to live all their lives, knowing that their personal virtue bore no ultimate relation to their worldly fate.

Fields's discussion of the aftermath of slavery links political, social and economic

aspects ofthe achievement ? or thwarted achievement ? of freedom. She argues that emancipation itself provided "no guarantee of a smooth transition from a

hybrid slave to a consistent free labor system."11 The "presuppositions of slavery"

shaped the ways in which freedmen would be treated by their employers and

by bitter ex-secessionists, while the uncertainties of the new free labor system threatened small-scale white farmers. In contrast to those neoclassical economists who have analyzed the aftermath of slavery in terms of the working out of market

forces, and debated whether those forces were or were not trammeled by racism, Fields insists that there was nothing automatic about a shift to market relations. Alternatives existed, or could at least be attempted. Both former masters and former slaves brought notions of entitlement with them out of slavery, and were

unlikely to relinquish them easily. Masters imagined themselves entitled to the labor ofa specific group of people; slaves imagined themselves entitled to a reliable subsistence. Fields concludes by suggesting that "black people were not likely to agree with former slaveowners about what the next step ought to be. But neither group was likely, without prodding, to settle into the routine of market relations. If these were to come about, they would have to be taught to all hands and the cook."12

If there is a substantial shortcoming in her otherwise brilliant study, it is that after this eloquent framing of the problems of postemancipation society, there




are only 26 pages left in which to explore what she terms "the new order in the

countryside" Fields sharply distinguishes the situation of Maryland from that

of the former Confederacy, noting that it did not share an orientation toward

exports, had a well-developed bourgeoisie and banking system, and escaped the war with minimal physical destruction. Her analysis thus shifts abruptly away from the immediate expectations of former masters and former slaves, and toward the larger logic of economic developments: "Whereas the drive to restore the staple economy in the credit-starved environment of the former Confederate states held freedmen on the land under various makeshift arrangements that camouflaged their increasingly proletarian status, the movement away from staple-crop agriculture in Maryland, lubricated by mortgage credit, gradually allowed rural

employers to dispense entirely with a good many laborers, while converting most of the remainder into straightforward wage hands."13 Clearly there is a point worth exploring further here: export agriculture, for all of its "modernity" seems to have yielded a kind of incomplete proletarianization, while truck farming led to a more thorough adoption of wage labor.14

By analyzing census records Fields confirms the shift to truck farming, and establishes the very limited extent of land ownership by blacks. Sharecropping, which she sees as a disguised form of wage labor, and share tenancy, which entailed at least some control over the crop, offered a livelihood of sorts, but permitted only limited access to land and credit. Wage labor, in turn, brought with it the

increasingly common threat of unemployment.15 The portrait Fields draws of transformation and hardship is convincing; what is missing is the sense of interaction that informs her earlier analysis of slavery and its breakdown during the Civil War. In terms of our earlier schema, her analysis encompasses market

positions and their effect on class relations, but in the final chapters she moves

away from close attention to the interpersonal aspect of relations of domination. The problem here, it must be admitted, is one that faces virtually all scholars as they relinquish the detailed records of emancipation and reconstruction, and turn to the more impersonal records of late nineteenth-century economic activity. Perhaps an entirely different kind of documentation ? such as local civil and criminal court proceedings ? must be explored in order to fill in the picture that is outlined by census records.

From the point of view of postemancipation studies, then, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground draws its greatest strength from the linkages back into the period of slavery and emancipation that it reveals. By contrast, it only sketches the linkages forward into the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century. Fields concludes with the sobering suggestion that both black and white

agriculturalists faced a difficult future, and notes that "Black Marylanders were not alone in discovering during those years that freedom was no fixed condition but a constantly moving target."16

Walter Rodney shares this concern with the struggle to define the meaning of freedom, and he views the process quite explicitly from the standpoint of labor relations and class formation. His History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905

begins its detailed study several decades after the end of slavery in what was then British Guiana. But his concerns ? with the structure of work, the level of

technology, the introduction of indentured workers, the nature of the market,




the concentration of landholding, and, crucially, the "extent to which an alteration of legal status was transformed into substantial social change" ? are continuous with those ofthe postemancipation period.17 Rodney is particularly insistent

upon the ways in which "free labor" is a misnomer for what followed slavery. It is not just that former slaves were not fully free, but also that "planters were

bitterly opposed to the untrammeled operation of free wage labor, while the former slaves were equally resistant to that aspect ofthe free labor system that demanded total alienation of workers from land ownership."18

On this point, both Rodney and Fields echo Marx's insistence that a proletariat is something that must be made ? not only freed from slavery but separated from access to the means of production.19 Class struggle, rather than the

operation of the market, is thus Rodney's major interpretive category, not simply because of his own analytic bent, but because a "free" market was, in his view, prevented from operating by that struggle.20 Perhaps the most impressive feature of Rodney's book is the breadth it gives to the concept of class struggle -

encompassing conflict over the control of the physical environment, over the

precise structure of work, and over the balance between time spent in "peasant" and in "proletarian" activities. His emphasis on class, however, does not preclude an interest in individuals, and he has found evidence that permits him to sketch in remarkable detail the lives both of workers and of those he sees as their enemies.21

Scholars have long recognized the importance of the physical environment for the pattern of postemancipation adaptations, and have generally focused on the

availability of "open land" and the opportunities ? or lack of them - for access to land by freedpeople. Rodney's work illustrates the equal importance of close attention to the character of the land itself, or, more precisely, to land as a "factor which is itself socially produced and defined," in Nigel Bolland's words.22 The

Guyanese coast had been won from the sea by the construction of vast earthworks and ditches, but water constantly threatened to reclaim the fertile coastal strip, either by flooding from inland or inundation from the sea. The maintenance of dams and drainage canals thus became part of the struggle over resources, and ditches as well as fields became a locus of conflict. A comparison with alluvial lands in Louisiana might be instructive. There, too, smallholders were burdened with levee maintenance, and any fragmentation of landholding made it difficult to put together the necessary large outlays of capital and labor.23 The evidence

Rodney develops for Guyana suggests that close examination of the social investments requisite for success in different physical environments can illuminate our understanding ofthe relative prospects of planters and freedpeople, villagers, wage laborers, and immigrants.24

Rodney's interest in class extends well beyond the dichotomy of masters and former slaves. He emphasizes, as have other scholars bf the Caribbean, the

interpenetration of the roles of peasant and free laborer, and the intricate ways in which individuals under stress contrived to earn a livelihood. Like Litwack, he is also concerned with the self-conceptions of freedmen, and he sees those

self-conceptions as eventually generating a sharp incompatibility between the values ofthe Creole descendants of slaves and the demands ofthe sugar estates, "given the terms on which estate labor was organized."25 Planters met this conflict




by importing indentured laborers on a large scale, to some extent suppianting former slaves and their descendants and undercutting their bargaining power.

While recognizing the conflicts of interest between Creoles and immigrants, Rodney avoids a stark contrast between Creoles seeking autonomy and East Indians locked into dependence. He is concerned in particular to emphasize the

periodic militancy of the indentured workers. In this his interpretation differs from that proposed in Jay R. Mandle's earlier work on Guyana's "plantation economy." Mandle argues that in major plantation regions "the essential social relations of production" in agriculture were retained across the period of transition, and implies that as long as some "nonmarket mechanism" for the mobilization of labor existed, there has been no fundamental change. While the continuities that Mandle points to are real, his approach tends to collapse into the category of "nonmarket mechanisms" a whole range of forms of exaction of labor, and to rule out as insignificant to "social relations of production" entire processes of

struggle, compromise, and transformation. Rodney would agree that domination

continued, but the evidence that he develops of legal challenges, strikes, and riots effectively rebuts Mandle's assumption that an attitude of "passivity, dependence, and, in the end, resignation" on the part of the indentured workers, combined with hostility between East Indians and Creoles, allowed the

"plantation economy" to persist.26 Rodney traces the links between the history of labor and political developments,

describing the evolution of the middle class, the changing strength of planters vis-a-vis the colonial state, and, eventually, the decline of the independent local

planter class. His narrative ends with the explicit class struggle manifested in the riots of 1905. Within those tumultuous events he finds an embryonic alliance between urban workers and sugar estate workers, both faced with stagnant wage rates; a conflict between the willingness of individual managers to negotiate and the unwillingness ofa colonial state fearful of rebellion to allow such negotiations; and a telling reluctance of the middle class to close ranks behind the state.27

The strikes of 1905 emerge in Rodney's analysis as the culmination of a crisis that had been building since 1884 as plantation owners and other employers failed to pass on to mill workers any of the gains in productivity realized through technological innovation, or to recognize that stagnant wages for field workers in a period of a rising cost of living would mean intense distress. Though the strikes were relatively brief, and effectively repressed, Rodney portrays 1905 as a turning point, a moment at which a postemancipation society in effect gave way to one in which workers would be organized for modern "industrial and trade union struggle."28

Rodney's interpretation would seem to invite ? and in some sense even require ? comparison with areas in which a similar unwillingness by planters to raise

wages did not provoke strikes. In Northeastern Brazil in the late nineteenth

century, productivity increased and wages fell, but sugar workers seem to have been caught in a web of dependency. There the turning point to modern "industrial and trade union struggle" would be delayed for decades. How much of this can be attributed to BraziPs weaker position in the world market ? which itself requires explanation ? and how much to well-established structures of rural dominance and monopoly over land?29 If one assumes class struggle to be a




fundamental feature of postemancipation societies, one should pay particular attention to those cases where it seems to have been absent, deflected, muted, or throttled.

Each of the works discussed so far focuses on a single society. Eric Foner's

Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy, however, is a collection of

thematically related essays that attempts explicit comparisons between different societies. The study is distinctive, and innovative, in several ways. On the one

hand, Foner combs the literature on the Caribbean and Southern and Eastern Africa for insights into struggles over land and labor that may "shed new light on the experience of the United States." On the other hand, he weaves aspects of the political history of Reconstruction into the story of labor conflict,

particularly in South Carolina, in order to substantiate the argument that in the United States, "the state itself, for a time, became a battleground between former master and former slave."30

The volume consists of three elegant and provocative essays written at different levels of generality. The introductory essay places emancipation within the context of world-wide shifts to capitalist labor relations, and thus examines both slave and non-slave societies in Africa and the Caribbean. The second essay examines the "political economy of emancipation" in the Southern United States, focusing on the ways in which the exercise of political power shaped class relations in the aftermath of abolition. The third essay treats a specific set of events in the South Carolina rice country, tracing the genesis of conflict between former slaves

and former masters and examining the crucial role of black officeholders in

shaping the outcomes of the conflict. Foner's use of comparative evidence is largely successful. The experience of the

British Caribbean calls particular attention to matters of immigration, taxation, and vagrancy legislation, which became part ofa larger struggle over the options and bargaining power of laborers. The case of the West Indies also permits Foner to emphasize the difference that it made for the freedmen in the Reconstruction South that there existed - however temporarily ? a certain number of

sympathetic local and state governments. This contrasts sharply with the plight of former slaves facing the hostile planter-dominated legislatures of the Caribbean, where laborers appeared, in Rodney's words, as "supplicants."31

In his eagerness to emphasize the uniqueness of Reconstruction as an

"experiment in interracial democraey," however, Foner's comparative perspective at times slides into a kind of American exceptionalism.32 Though he explicitly excludes Cuba and Brazil from his comparison, he then goes on to generalize as though they did not exist at all. He claims for emancipation in the United

States a series of "unique" features: the importance of a war "in which armed blacks played a crucial part," the existence of slavery within a "rapidly expanding capitalist economic order," and a complex east of characters within a majority white society "divided against itself." But for each of these Cuba and, to a lesser

extent, Brazil could have provided significant parallels.33 The decision to exclude those cases thus diminishes somewhat the potential of his own comparative approach.

While Foner's study remains primarily a contribution to the history of the United States, his sensitivity to evidence from other societies makes his analysis




of the American South particularly valuable for those who would extend

comparison still further. He focuses close attention on the struggle that emerged over freedmen's access to land and to other resources that might reduce their

reliance on employment for wages. Conflicts over land have long been recognized as a central feature of the postemancipation period, but Foner, along with Rodney and Fields, contributes particularly to our understanding of conflict over rights to the commons: in South Carolina freedmen saw their right to hunt curtailed; in Guyana planters threatened to deny workers and villagers the right to fish in the drainage canals; in Maryland the General Assembly attempted to restrict

oyster tongmen.34 Such efforts served directly to limit the options of freedmen, and indirectly to extend the concepts of private property and state authority. In the Guyanese case, Rodney emphasizes, the restriction of rights was

accompanied by the granting of selective, and entangling, privileges. The worker who depended on his employer's permission to pasture a cow on the estate, for

example, was compromised in his ability to challenge working conditions. Such

dependency was fostered in a systematic fashion in the Northeast of Brazil, where

squatters eventually came to owe unpaid labor to landowners in exchange for

implicit permission to remain unmolested on their land.35 Foner and Rodney also share an interest in the labor process itself. Instead

of contenting themselves with the categories of slave labor and wage labor, they examine the precise manner in which workers worked and employers paid them. Foner's discussion of strikes in South Carolina, for example, builds on an analysis ofthe "task system" ? the specification of expected labor in terms of a particular unit of work rather than in terms of hours. He portrays task work as a form of labor that had afforded slaves an "unparalleled degree of control over the pace and length of the work day and the opportunity to acquire significant amounts of property," advantages they were reluctant to relinquish with emancipation.36 In Guyana, too, task work was used. But Rodney's analysis emphasizes its

drawbacks, particularly for indentured workers less familiar with the terrain:

employers were able to alter the size of a "task" in ways that amounted to a cut in wages, and workers could be denied compensation altogether if the overseer

judged the work imperfectly performed.37 In the analyses of Foner and Rodney, it is the interaction between worker and

employer that is seen as shaping the work process. Though planters had the upper hand, adaptation took place on both sides. In South Carolina employers sought to introduce payment in "checks" of limited negotiability, hoping to manipulate the rate of pay and extend their control over freedmen who insisted on

determining the pace of work. In Guyana laborers developed the instrument of

"independent task gangs," groups of workers who ranged across the countryside to find those employers providing the most acceptable rate of pay and size of task.38 Instead of seeing postemancipation labor arrangements as a simple "compromise" between the desires of planters and those of freedmen, this

perspective emphasizes an ongoing process of negotiation ? often bitter ? that

yields a succession of labor forms.39

Each of these studies raises a set of questions that invite comparative examination. One can undertake such comparison from any of the perspectives




we have discussed, examining patterns of responses by individuals, by classes, and by the state, as well as analyzing processes of emancipation within the larger context of world markets or colonial systems. Ideally, however, comparison would also illuminate links between the different bands of evidence and reveal

connections that are not always apparent in monographic studies.40 Examination of the goals of freedmen in different societies, for example, may

help to clarify their part in the struggle over the meaning of freedom. The concept ofa search by freedmen for "autonomy," invoked by Foner and others, represents a great advance over the old belief that former slaves sought either to flee the

plantations and revert to subsistence, or to flood into the cities.41 Foner and Litwack place particular emphasis on the search for land and for control over one's own pace of work. But where land was unavailable and wage labor on the

estate the norm, what values did former slaves defend? And what kinds of differences ? by gender and by age, for example ? emerge? In Cuba, freedmen and freedwomen on occasion managed to combine rural and urban employment, with the man working on an estate and the woman working in town, except "at harvest time when she might join the estate labor force. This may be seen in part as a preference on the part of employers for "bachelor" laborers lodged in barracks, but for freedpeople it seems also to have represented a way of loosening the grip ofthe estate over their lives and work, even when they could not escape the need to labor there.42 Here it is not simply the autonomy of the individual that is at stake, but the degree of achievement of several goals by an entire family.

In both Guyana and Louisiana one finds organized strikes in the sugar fields, a different kind of response from the pursuit of small holdings or subsistence

cultivation, and one that evoked a different reaction from both planters and the state. In Cuba there were few strikes in the immediate postemancipation period, but within less than two decades former slaves had joined with other Cubans in an armed challenge to Spanish rule. We do not yet have a clear analysis of the interpenetration of the seemingly "peasant" struggle for land, and the

"proletarian" weapon of strikes. Tb propose such a dichotomy may, indeed, be

misleading, particularly during the process of transition when a working class is being forged out of separate elements, and when former slaves and peasants are at once undergoing and resisting proletarianization itself. But the connections between these different responses need to be traced, as do the relations between them and larger political conflicts.43

All of the studies under review here directly or indirectly raise the issue of

the contested role of the state. It is clear that the state and its different branches could play competing or overlapping roles as guarantor of the supply of labor,

regulator of relations between employer and worker, champion of the rights of

freedmen, or, conceivably, redistributor of goods and entitlements. The mix

obviously varied enormously from society to society, as did the definition of the

rights and obligations under dispute. We tend to assume, for example, that expanded control over labor is something

colonial powers can provide for their planter classes if they wish to ? but both the will and the ability are on occasion notably lacking. Spain's labor policy in Cuba after emancipation reflected both the priority given to maintaining the colonial tie and the constraints imposed by an impecunious treasury. Britain in




its dealings with the postemancipation West Indies was constrained, in part, by a series of ideological commitments enshrined in public opinion.44 Comparative study of comparable colonies of different powers, or of varied colonies of a single power, may illuminate the kinds of constraints that the state may face. The British

empire, because of the range of colonies it comprised, obviously lends itself to such comparison.45 Nigel Bolland and William Green have debated the contrasts between the non-sugar-producing mainland colony of Belize and the classic sugar islands after emancipation; one might also investigate metropolitan responsiveness toward the interests of planters in those sugar colonies undergoing growth in

contrast with those that appeared already to be in decline.46 In addressing questions concerning class relations, it may be appropriate to

supplement cross-national comparisons with other kinds of analysis. For example, one line of inquiry may be to compare regions within a specific polity, in an

effort to delineate geographic, demographic, economic, and cultural variations and their consequences for postemancipation adaptations. Ira Berlin, in an elegant essay, has recently demonstrated the value of such comparisons for the study of slavery, examining three distinct regions of the mainland British North

American colonies.47 The volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History are

organized in part along these lines and will provide important evidence and

analysis. It is no news to scholars of Reconstruction that the sugar, rice, tobacco, and cotton areas ofthe South differed in their histories; but a focused comparison that draws on archival data and traces the roots of regularities and differences remains to be done. In such a comparison one is not strictly speaking holding the larger political environment constant while varying the geography, because the nature of local elites and of state governments will obviously vary as well. But one may be able to eliminate some ofthe variation that makes cross-national

comparisons so difficult. A second strategy would be to reverse the procedure, by holding the crop

constant and varying the polity. This is in many ways even more perilous, for a great deal varies as one shifts from country to country. But such a comparison could throw into relief the effects of the status of different producers in the world

market, the political context of abolition, and the relative position of a given crop region in the national economy. An examination, for example, of the

behavior of freedmen and the structuring of labor relations in sugar-producing regions of Cuba, Brazil, and the United States could identify regularities associated with specific forms of agriculture, and at the same time indicate the importance ofthe quite varied political and economic environments in which emancipation occurred in these countries. Rather than use comparative cases as foils for U.S.

history - as Foner does in his commparison of the apparent political stasis of the British Caribbean with the turmoil of Reconstruction ? one might try to

give equal emphasis to the various regions studied. Such an approach might show, for example, that Reconstruction and the Cuban War for Independence of 1895 were both, in their own way, uncompleted "experiments in interracial

democracy."48 A third kind of comparison, one that ventures outside the framework of

emancipation, may also prove useful. By identifying parallel features of the

relationships among employer, laborer, land, and markets in regions that




experienced slavery and regions that did not, it may prove possible to broaden the focus and analyze a wider range of outcomes. Foner does this very briefly in reference to Africa, but his purposes in doing so are deliberately limited. If one moves beyond the conspicuous fact of slavery and abolition to the more

general phenomenon of the expansion of capitalism, the possibilities in one sense become too great, and historians of the Americas risk finding themselves awash in a flood of historical and anthropological literature on the rest of the world. This makes the prospect of such comparisons daunting, but it does not invalidate them. Comparison has, after all, functions beyond that of affording the historian the nearest approximation to a controlled experiment. It is also a technique for

understanding large processes, processes that by their nature overlap and influence each other, making the interpretive task still more difficult. Because it involves the juxtaposition of unfreedom and freedom, the abolition of slavery may seem

analytically unique. But the process of transformation of slaves into various kinds

of "free" laborers is historically linked, both globally and locally, to the transformation of peasants into various kinds of "free" laborers as well. In Cuba, for example, the ending of slavery coincided with the rise of the colonato, a system of dependent cane-farming analogous in some ways to sharecropping. But it was

not former slaves who comprised the majority of colonos, it was white free smallholders and recent immigrants.

In extending comparison beyond postemancipation societies one can as a first

step examine the factors determining the range of options available to employer and worker in comparable cases. Nigel Bolland's analysis of Belize, for example, reveals the extreme forms of domination that characterized the extractive

mahogany industry after the end of slavery. Barbara Weinstein, in her study of the extractive rubber industry in the Brazilian Amazon, has found a range of

forms of domination, some of them quite loose and incomplete, and unrelated to a slave history.49 The difficulties inherent in controlling a widely dispersed work force appear to have resolved themselves in contrasting ways in these two cases. Similarly, Gerald Jaynes compares the internal dynamics of work groups in Southern cotton fields and English coal mines in order to analyze the role of squad leaders and the degree of control over production afforded to the

employer under different arrangements.50 Each of these proposed kinds of comparative study will require close attention

to the interrelations between economic activity, social relations, and political power. In that sense, postemancipation studies invite ambitious attempts to link transformations in labor systems to larger political developments. In addition to being explorations in the meaning of freedom, they may thus become an

important part of the much larger effort to understand how the actions of largely unorganized workers shaped the societies in which they lived.51

University of Michigan Rebecca Scott Ann Arbor, Ml 48109




FOOTNOTES

1. I am very grateful for comments on earlier drafts of this essay from Muriel Bell, Elizabeth Cohen, Frederick Cooper, Eugene Genovese, Thomas Holt, Sidney Mintz, Peter Railton, and Anne Scott. I would like to thank the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences for support in the form of a research fellowship during 1984-85. I am also grateful to John Coatsworth, Thomas Holt, and Joseph Reidy for allowing me to read some of their recent unpublished work.

2. I shall concentrate on a group of studies concerned with social and economic processes, and leave aside for the moment those that focus upon the more strictly political aspects of Reconstruction, or upon "race relations" as such. The works I shall discuss are Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, editors, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, Series II, The Black Military Experience (Cambridge, Eng., 1982); Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1985); Erie Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge, 1983); Leon E Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); and Walter Rodney, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905 (Baltimore, 1981). Were it not for limitations of space, the list could easily be expanded. Frederick Cooper's From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Coastal Kenya, 1890-1925 (New Haven, 1980) pioneered the examination of relations between planters, laborers, and the state during the transition away from slavery in the context of colonialism in Africa. Thomas Holt's forthcoming study, The Problem of Freedom: The Political Economy of Jamaica after Slavery, explores related issues, and my own Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, 1985) examines abolition and its aftermath. Two additional works appeared in print just as this essay was being prepared for publication: Series I, Vol. 1, of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, titled The Destruction of Slavery, and edited by Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph R Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland (Cambridge, Eng., 1985); and Gerald David Jaynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882 (New York, 1986). I shall make reference to these additional works on certain points of interpretation, but will not attempt to review them in full.

3. Eugene Genovese employs the image ofthe "moment of truth," and analyzes that moment j in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), especially pp. 97-112.

4. For a perceptive study of former masters' responses to emancipation, and their efforts to adjust to free labor, see James L. Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1977). The role ofthe Freedmen's Bureau in urging contracts on both employers and freedpeople should not be underestimated, and the question of why the annual contract came to seem so essential might logically be extended to the Bureau as well as to employers.

5. See Jaynes, Branches, especially pp. 102-137 and Part III, "Agrarian Organization."

6. Berlin et al., Freedom, Series II, doc. 106, pp. 268-9. Punctuation of this passage differs somewhat from the conventions of the editors of Freedom.

7. In Cuba between 1868 and 1878 some slaves joined an insurrectionist army that aimed at emancipation as well as the ending of Spanish rule. For a discussion of relations between masters and slave soldiers in that context, see Scott, Slave Emancipation, chap. 2.

8. Berlin et al., Freedom, Series II, doc. 187, pp. 459-60.

9. See the discussion in Berlin et al., Freedom, Series II, pp. 183-97.

10. Fields, Slavery and Freedom, p. 127.






13. Fields, Slavery and Freedom, p. 170-71.

14. This notion of incomplete proletarianization after slavery is one that is being developed by a range of scholars working on various areas. The sugar regions of Brazil, discussed briefly below, offer a striking example, while Puerto Rico and portions of the U.S. South offer other instances. My thinking on this subject has been stimulated in part by recent exchanges with Thomas Holt and Francisco Scarano.

15. Jaynes also emphasizes rural unemployment. See Branches, p. 248.


17. Rodney, History, p. 31. An earlier study that focuses explicitly on the aftermath of slavery is Alan Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 18384904 (New Haven, 1972). Adamson analyzes the growth of villages after slavery and the efforts of the colonial state to stymie that growth by favoring the sugar sector, both through indentured immigration and through legislation.

18. See Rodney, History, p. 32.

19. This interpretation is also a point of departure for Cooper, Foner, and Mintz. See Fields, Slavery and Freedom, p. 154; Cooper, From Slaves to Squatters, especially pp. 83-4, 215; Foner, Nothing but Freedom; and Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974).

20. The debate, in the U.S. context, over whether outcomes should be viewed as the result of the operation of the market or of class struggle appears to be growing somewhat barren, as one might expect from such a dichotomous formulation. See, for example, Ralph Shlomowitz, " 'Bound* or 'Free'? Black Labor in Cotton and Sugarcane Farming, 1865-1880," Joumal of Southern History 50 (1984): 569-96. For a comprehensive discussion of the issues, see Harold D. Woodman, "Sequel to Slavery: The New History Views the Postbellum South," Journal of Southern History 43 (1977): 523-54. For a heated debate on related questions, see Jonathan Wiener, "Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865-1955," The American Historical Review 84 (1979): 970-92, and comments by Robert Higgs, Harold D. Woodman, and Jonathan Wiener in the same issue. The classic analysis of emancipation in the United States in terms of class formation is, of course, W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (first published 1935, reissue, New York, 1969). Two comprehensive attempts by economists to examine the evolution of labor forms are Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge, Eng., 1977), and Jaynes, Branches Without Roots.

21. Surely the most memorable of the "class enemies" is Captain, later Major, de Rinzy, a police officer involved first in arresting and firing upon Indian workers during a strike in 1896, and then in shooting African workers in 1905. Rodney, History, pp. 158-59, 209-16.

22. For a pointed debate on the explanatory importance of population density in the analysis of postemancipation societies, see O. Nigel Bolland, "Systems of Domination after Slavery: The Control of Land and Labor in the British West Indies after 1838" Comparative Studies in Society and History (hereafter CSSH) 23 (1981): 591-619, the comment by William A. Green titled "The Perils of Comparative History: Belize and the British Sugar Colonies after Slavery," CSSH 26 (1984): 112-19, and the reply by Bolland on pp. 120-25 ofthe same issue. The quotation is from Bolland, "Systems," p. 614.

23. On Louisiana, see Joseph P. Reidy, "Sugar and Freedom: Emancipation in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes," presented at the 1980 American Historical Association Annual Meetings; Carlyle




Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (Lexington, KY, 1953); and Jeffrey Gould, "The Strike of 1887: Louisiana Sugar War," Southern Exposure 12 (1984): 45-55.

24. Adamson's analysis of the failure of communal villages, for example, emphasizes the difficulty of maintaining drainage systems and acquiring the capital necessary for sugar planting. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves, p. 36.

25. Rodney, History, p. 162.

26. See Jay R. Mandle, The Plantation Economy: Population and Economic Change in Guyana, 18384960 (Philadelphia, 1973), especially pp. 11 and 64.

27. Rodney, History, pp. 190-216.


29. On Northeastern Brazil after emancipation, see Manuel Correia de Andrade, A terra e o homem no Nordeste (Sao Paulo, 1963), and Andrade, "Transicao do Trabalho Escravo para o Trabalho Livre no Nordeste Acucareiro: 1850/1888," Estudos Economicos 13 (1983): 71-83; Peter L. Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry in Permambuco: Modernization without Change, 1840-1910 (Berkeley, 1974); Gadiel Perruci, A republica das usinas. Um estudo de historia social e economica do Nordeste: 1889-1930 (Rio de Janeiro, 1978); and Jaime Reis, "From Bangue to Usina: Social Aspects of Growth and Modernization in the Sugar Industry of Pernambuco (1850-1930)," in Kenneth Duncan and Ian Rutledge, eds., Land and Labour in Latin America (Cambridge, Eng., 1977), pp. 369-96. A recent but quite narrow study is Martha Knisely Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World (New Brunswick, N.J., 1985).

30. Foner, Nothing But Freedom, pp. 2, 3.


32. Foner, Nothing But Freedom, p. 6.

33. These phrases on the uniqueness ofthe U.S. case are found in Foner, Nothing But Freedom, p. 39. For Brazil, see, in addition to the sources cited above, Vilma Paraiso Ferreira de Almada, ,Escravismo e transicao: O Espirito Santo (1850/1888) (Rio de Janeiro, 1984); Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (Berkeley, 1972); Warren Dean, Rio Chxro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820-1920 (Stanford, 1976); Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 18504900 (first published, 1958; reprint ed., Princeton, 1985); Robert Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York, 1975); and Emilia Viotti da Costa, Da senzala a colonia (Sao Paulo, 1966). On Cuba, see Raul Cepero Bonilla, Azucar y abolicion (Havana, 1948); Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Azucar y poblacion en los Antillas (Havana, 1976); Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1970); Scott, Slave Emancipation', and the essays by Fe Iglesias and Manuel Moreno Fraginais in Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman, Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1985).

34. Foner, Nothing But Freedom, pp. 66-7; Rodney, History, p. 60; Fields, Slavery and Freedom, pp. 182-6.

35. See Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry, and Reis, "From Bangue to Usina" Reis argues, however, that the owing of unpaid labor was not an immediate postemancipation development. See also Correia de Andarde, A terra e o homem.

36. Foner, Nothing But Freedom, p. 79.

37. Rodney, History, pp. 42, 58.




38. Foner, Nothing But Freedom, p. 91; Rodney, History, pp. 53-4. Jaynes examines the internal organization of labor gangs and squads in the U.S. South, emphasizing both internal democraey and internal conflict. See Branches Without Roots, Part III, "Agrarian Organization."

39. Jaynes, in Branches Without Roots, similarly analyzes the shift not as one from slavery to sharecropping, but as one from slavery, to gang labor, to squad labor, to family tenancy of various kinds. The process is seen as uneven, and the form of payment ? share vs. money wage ? is not necessarily tied to the specific mode of organization of laborers.

40. An early call for the comparative study of emancipation came from C. Vann Woodward in a 1970 essay, "Emancipations and Reconstructions: A Comparative Study," reprinted in revised form as "The Price of Freedom," in David G. Sansing, What Was Freedom's Price? (Jackson, Miss., 1978), pp. 93-113. His emphasis, like Foner's, was in part on comparison as a means of highlighting the uniqueness of the U.S. experience.

41. Jamaica is often imagined by North American scholars to be the locus classicus ofthe "flight to the hills." But Douglas Hall and Thomas Holt both make it clear that freedmen often sought proximity to marketing centers as well as distance from the plantation, and in some instances combined wage work, subsistence cultivation, and production of crops for the market. See Douglas Hall, Free Jamaica, 18384865: An Economic History (New Haven, 1959), and Thomas Holt, "Slaves into Free Men: Emancipation in Jamaica," presented at the 1981 American Historical Association Annual Meetings. Holt has developed his discussion of autonomy further in "The Problem of Freedom: Emancipation, Race, and Modernization" (ms).

42. For a further discussion of this phenomenon, see Scott, Slave Emancipation, chaps. 10 and 11. Jaynes analyzes the partial withdrawal of women from wage labor, contrasting patterns observed in the sugar and cotton regions. Branches Without Roots, chap. 12.

43. See Rodney, History, pp. 32-3; Reidy, "Sugar and Freedom;" Gould, "Sugar War;" and William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest: Louisiana Politics, 1877-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1969). For a perceptive critique of the notion of a dichotomy between peasant and proletarian aspirations in the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean, see Brian H. Pollitt, "Agrarian Reform and the Agriculturai Prletariat' in Cuba, 1958-66: Some Notes," and "Agrarian Reform and the Agriculturai Proletariat' in Cuba, 1958-66: Further Notes and Some Second Thoughts" University of Glagow, Institute of Latin American Studies, Occasional Papers No. 27 (1979) and No. 30 (1980). For some observations on the relationship between slave emancipation and political conflict in Cuba, see Rebecca J. Scott, "Class Relations in Sugar and Political Mobilization in Cuba, 1868-1899," Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos 15 (1985): 15-28.

44. On Spain in Cuba, see Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 18174886 (Austin, 1967), and Scott, Slave Emancipation. On different aspects of British policy in the West Indies, see William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 18304865 (Oxford, Eng., 1976); Thomas Holt,

" An Empire over the Mind:' Emancipation, Race, and Ideology in the British West Indies and the American South," in J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C Vann Woodward (New York, 1982); and David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984).

45. For an analysis of British behavior in East Africa, which differed in significant respects from that in the Caribbean, see Cooper, Slaves to Squatters.

46. See Bolland, "Systems;" Green, "Perils;" and the reply by Bolland. See also Sidney Mintz, "Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries," in Michael Craton, ed., Roots and Branches: Current Directions in Slave Studies (Toronto, 1979), and the Commentary by Woodville Marshall in the same volume.

47. Ira Berlin, "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America," American Historical Review 85 (1980): 44-78.




48. For some initial suggestions of questions one might address in such a comparative study, see Rebecca J. Scott, "The Meaning of Freedom: Postemancipation Society in Sugar-Producing Regions of Brazil, Cuba, and Louisiana," presented at the University of California, Irvine, Ninth Annual Seminar on Social History and Theory, March 29, 1986.

49. See Bolland, "Systems;" and Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom: 18504920 (Stanford, 1983).

50. Jaynes, Branches Without Roots, pp. 173-86.

51. For a suggestive recent attempt to examine parallel phenomena in nineteenth-century Latin America, see John Coatsworth, "Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Latin America: Mexico in Comparative Perspective," (ms).



comparing emancipations

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