New Frontiers of Slavery Item Type Book Authors Tomich, Dale W. DOI 10.1353/book.83858 Publisher SUNY Press Rights Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Download date 05/10/2021 19:51:27 Item License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Link to Item https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6146-new-frontiers-of- slavery.aspx New Frontiers of Slavery FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE Series Editor: Richard E. Lee The Fernand Braudel Center Studies in Historical Social Science will publish works that address theoretical and empirical questions produced by scholars in or through the Fernand Braudel Center or who share its approach and concerns. It specifically seeks to promote works that contribute to the development of the world-systems perspective engag- ing a holistic and relational vision of the world—the modern world-system—implicit in historical social science, which at once takes into consideration structures (long-term regularities) and change (history). With the intellectual boundaries within the sciences/ social sciences/humanities structure collapsing in the work scholars actually do, this series will offer a venue for a wide range of research that confronts the dilemmas of producing relevant accounts of historical processes in the context of the rapidly changing structures of both the social and academic world. The series will include monographs, colloquia, and collections of essays organized around specific themes. VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES: Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge I: Determinism Richard E. Lee, editor Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge II: Reductionism Richard E. Lee, editor Questioning Nineteenth-Century Assumptions about Knowledge III: Dualism Richard E. Lee, editor The Longue Durée and World-Systems Analysis Richard E. Lee, editor New Frontiers of Slavery Dale W. Tomich, editor New Frontiers of Slavery Edited and with an Introduction by Dale W. Tomich FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER STUDIES IN HISTORICAL SOCIAL SCIENCE Cover photo courtesy of Dale W. Tomich Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2016 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Ryan Morris Marketing, Kate R. Seburyamo Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New frontiers of slavery / edited and with an introduction by Dale W. Tomich. pages cm. — (SUNY series, fernand braudel center studies in historical social science) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-5863-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4384-5865-6 (e-book) 1. Slavery—Case studies. 2. Slaves—Case studies. I. Tomich, Dale W., 1946– HT861.N49 2015 306.3’62—dc23 2014048846 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This volume is dedicated to Stanley J. Stein and in memory of Barbara H. Stein CONTENTS List of Tables ix Introduction 1 Dale W. Tomich Vassouras Yesterday and Today: Revisiting the Work of Stanley J. Stein 5 Dale W. Tomich Agency and Transnational Perspectives on the Constitution of Waged, Unfree, and Free Labor: The Role of Mobility in the Nineteenth Century 23 Yann Moulier Boutang The Discovery of Progress in Cuba: Machines, Slaves, Businesses 49 José Antonio Piqueras Antislavery and Nationalism on the Two Sides of the Atlantic: In Search of Forgotten Links between the Nineteenth-Century Americas and Europe 77 Enrico Dal Lago African Labor in Guyana and the Expansion of the Second Slavery 101 Wazir Mohamed On the Blurred Boundaries of Freedom: Liberated Africans in Cuba, 1817–1870 127 Inés Roldán de Montaud vii Plantation Laboratories: Industrial Experiments in the Cuban Sugar Mill, 1830–1860 157 Daniel Rood Slavery, Frontier, and Diplomatic Relations: Brazil-Uruguay, 1840–1860 185 Keila Grinberg & Rachel Caé Ruling the Household: Masters and Domestic Slaves in the Paraíba Valley, Brazil, during the Nineteenth Century 203 Mariana Muaze French Travelers and Journalists Debate the Lei do Ventre Livre of 1871 225 Claudia Santos List of Contributors 249 Index 251 viii TABLES 3.1 Opposing Concepts in Discurso sobre la agricultura 52 3.2 Opposing Applications in Discurso sobre la agricultura 70 6.1 Liberated Africans in Cuba, 1824–1866 131 6.2 Emancipados up to March 1831 and Mortality 137 6.3 Emancipated Blacks in June 1841 138 6.4 Slaves Captured by British Cruisers and Cuban Authorities up to 1854 and Declared Emancipados 145 8.1 Independence and the End of Slavery in South American Countries, 1810–1888 188 ix Introduction Dale W. Tomich his book examines nineteenth-century slavery from a distinct conceptual and Thistoriographical perspective. Conventionally, slavery has been understood as a uniform phenomenon. Although slavery in different countries exhibits particular national variations, these are fundamentally regarded as different iterations on the same thing. These iterations are viewed as independent of one another, and the goal of comparative study is to disclose variations between independent national cases. In this context, slavery is generally regarded as archaic, backward, and incompat- ible with a modern economic, social, and political order. Consequently, the “great transformation” of the nineteenth century signaled the universal crisis of slavery; the emergence of free markets, modern industry, modern forms of the nation-state, abolitionism, and liberal ideology are taken to have inevitably destroyed chattel slavery throughout the Americas. In contrast, the perspective adopted here regards slavery in the Americas as part of the modern world-economy. It calls attention to the interrelation and interdependence of slave systems as part of a larger socioeconomic whole; that is, particular instances of slavery are understood as constituted and reconstituted within processes of the capitalist world-economy. Hence, modern slaveries are not viewed as uniform and homogeneous, nor are they seen to be directly comparable 1 with one another outside of world-economic processes. Rather, they are treated as distinct local responses to world-economic transformations. This perspective opens a new analytical and interpretive approach to the crisis of slavery in the nineteenth century. It emphasizes the differentiation, heterogeneity, and specificity of particu- lar slave systems as part of the political, economic, and social transformations of the world-economy. Most importantly, it distinguishes between the redeployment of slave relations in new zones of commodity production and the simultaneous crises of older zones of colonial slavery, which I have elsewhere analyzed as the formation of the second slavery (Tomich 2003, esp. pp. 56–71). In complex and contradictory ways, slavery and bonded labor are disclosed as spatially and temporally heterogeneous and, at the same time, as integral aspects of the “great transformation,” modernity, and capitalist development. These “new frontiers of slavery” differ from the older zones of colonial slavery. They emerged after the Haitian Revolution and the destruction of colonialism as the organizing framework of the Atlantic world. They presuppose and are part of the historical transformations of the world-economy marked by the developments noted above: free markets, industrial capitalism, independent nation-states, abolition- ism, and liberal ideology. The distinctions between the older colonial slavery and this newer “second slavery” are expressed in the relations between masters, slaves, and freed people, in the local society and at the level of the world-economy itself. The chapters in this book explore the “new frontiers of slavery” by addressing a variety of conceptual and substantive historical problems within this framework. They emphasize in new ways the importance of Atlantic slavery for the formation of the modern world-economy as they indicate new perspectives on old problems and raise new questions for research. This project was initiated at a conference, “O Século XIX e as Novas Fronteiras da Escravidão e Liberdade,” held in Rio de Janeiro and Vassouras, Brazil, in 2009 under the sponsorship of the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; the Universidade Severino Sombra, Vassouras, RJ, Brazil; the Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and the Fernand Braudel Center, Binghamton University, Binghamton, NY. We would particularly like to thank Keila Grinberg, Ricardo Salles, and Rafael Marquese 2 for their efforts in organizing this event. The conference brought together scholars from Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. Several of the papers in this volume are from this conference, while others are the result of subsequent discussion of these themes and problems. No one participating in a conference on slavery held in Vassouras could help but feel the presence of Stanley Stein. His classic work Vassouras (1985) is still the necessary reference for Brazilian coffee plantation slavery and remains a model for scholars of slavery throughout the Americas. Everyone participating in the project feels in his intellectual debt. This volume is dedicated