This ambitious, compact volume situates slavery in British Colonial North America and the United States in hemispheric and trans-Atlantic context. It does so by surveying the tradition of comparative scholarship touching on this topic, ranging from Frank Tannenbaum up through recent synthetic narratives of the rise and fall of New-World slavery. The result is an overview of a broad arc of history and a complex body of scholarship that will be of value to multiple audiences. Its breadth and its concise discussion of major developments will aid advanced undergraduates, while its comments on comparative method and historiography will be helpful to graduate students. Veteran scholars of Atlantic slavery will find a detailed synthesis with fresh insights and suggestions for future research.
Dal Lago's introduction sketches the evolution of this scholarship work by work, attending to the variety of comparisons across time and among regions that have addressed the US South and the colonial slave societies of South Carolina and Virginia. Regional comparisons, he shows, have ranged within and among empires across the Atlantic to forms of unfree labour in the Old World, and between North America, Latin America and the Caribbean. Dal Lago demonstrates that the rise of Atlantic and world history has enriched comparative scholarship on New-World slavery but also challenged it to avoid treating regions, especially nation-states, as discrete entities. Dal Lago builds on others to encourage an integration of comparative, transnational and global approaches that keeps the nation-state around as one of many possible units of analysis.
The following six chapters move chronologically from the sixteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century. The first three chapters concentrate on the Atlantic World while the latter three also attend to Southern and Eastern Europe. Each chapter discusses key studies and developments. Throughout, Dal Lago incorporates concepts and distinctions from other scholars, including Moses Finley (societies with slaves and slave societies), Jason Moore (commodity frontiers), Dale Tomich (the second slavery) and Immanuel Wallerstein (economic cores and peripheries).
Chapter one explores the shifting contours of Atlantic slave trading up to British pre-eminence, the rise of plantations in Brazil, Barbados, Virginia and South Carolina, and the relationship between slave ethnicity and resistance. Dal Lago argues that these four slave societies formed historically unprecedented agricultural peripheries to an emerging European core economy that also transformed labour relations in grain-growing regions of Eastern Europe. Chapter two examines the maturation of these four colonial slave societies in the eighteenth century. Slaveholders partially embraced reform currents ranging from enlightenment ideals to evangelicalism and wedded aristocratic aspirations to a calculating entrepreneurialism. Enslaved populations went – to varying degrees – through a process of creolisation that mixed African and European cultures. Two revolutions, the American and Haitian, reconfigured New-World slavery, but European demand and the ascent of conservative ideologies facilitated its dramatic post-revolutionary expansion. Chapter three turns to the second slavery of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, comparing the US South, southern Brazil and Cuba with the Sokoto Caliphate in West Africa, which was one of the largest Atlantic slave societies. While the expansion of the Sokoto Caliphate reflected religious and geopolitical imperatives, these other three societies grew due to their role as commodity frontiers for Europe and slaveholders' eager use of technological innovations in cultivation, transport and processing. Dal Lago also considers how distinctively syncretic slave religions influenced resistance and rebellion in each of these societies.
Chapter four focuses on land management, labour relations and agronomy in the antebellum South, Russia, Prussia, southern Italy and southern and eastern Spain, all of which served as commodity frontiers for industrialising Europe. Here, Dal Lago acknowledges the differences among the labour regimes in these societies – which ranged from slavery to serfdom to nominal freedom – while stressing that each inhabited a continuum of free and unfree forms of labour. Dal Lago also contends that we are primed for a transnational and comparative study of agrarian modernisation, including the interest in agronomy common to elites in these regions. Chapter five shifts emphasis to the entangled careers of Atlantic progressives struggling for abolitionism and democratic nationalism. After a concise history of American, British, Irish and French abolitionism into the 1840s, Dal Lago analyses the affinities and relationships among William Lloyd Garrison, William Henry Ashurst, Daniel O'Connell and Giuseppe Mazzini, with attention to the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention and the Revolutions of 1848. Chapter six examines three topics – nationalism, emancipation and nation-building – usually treated separately. He develops three sets of comparisons of: emancipation in the civil war-era United States, Brazil, Cuba, and (of serfs) in Russia and Romania; the character of liberal nationalism in the US Republican Party, bourgeois Europe and Latin America; and nation-making during the Risorgimento and the American civil war. These illuminate the irony – which Dal Lago formulates as a Hegelian dialectic – that the moderate anti-slavery Republican Party orchestrated a radical emancipation that was immediate and uncompensated. Dal Lago then concludes by recapping his claims and offering a helpful bibliographic essay.
This volume offers much to contemplate and leaves room for but a few quibbles. Readers will find that Dal Lago occasionally leaves the analytical benefit of specific comparisons unclear. Also, Dal Lago could have better explained why he attends to those topics, regions and comparisons he does. For example, given his thoughts about retaining the nation-state as a unit of analysis, one might have expected a fuller comparison of governments around the Atlantic and their relations to slaves and slaveholders. Likewise, since Dal Lago emphasises the importance of the second slavery, he could have said more about the development and inner workings of western European capital and trade networks. A fuller assessment of race, gender and the law would have enriched his discussion of comparisons of New-World slavery and agrarian labour in Europe. It is hard not to wonder about coeval commodity frontiers in East Africa, Asia and Australia. These points, however, underscore the value of Dal Lago's detailed synthesis. If anything, the reader would like to see his analysis expanded and applied more broadly still.
