In this thoroughly researched, thoughtful, and well-written work, Richard Follett explores the economics of the sugar industry of southern Louisiana before the Civil War while also examining the social, cultural, and ideological world of master and slave within this distinct agricultural and environmental context. His central contention is that Louisiana's antebellum sugar industry exhibited characteristics of a capitalistic social order, such as the supremacy of the marketplace and acquisitive individualism, as well as those associated with a prebourgeois (or antibourgeois) social order, such as the principle of reciprocal obligations between superior and subordinate members of society. Moreover, Follett maintains that slaveholders employed a combination of coercion and incentives to induce slaves to acquiesce to the unrelenting demands of sugar plantation routine and to the hyper-exploitation of labor that sugar production required. Slaves, for their part, accommodated themselves to this demanding “agro-industrial” complex and to the sugar masters' authority in order to improve their daily living conditions and, more importantly, to establish not only customary privileges but also supposed proprietary rights over their property and labor. Thus, the masters' balancing of market-oriented incentives and force, along with the slaves' agency, drove the antebellum Louisiana sugar industry toward maximum efficiency.

Follett demonstrates how capitalism's profit-maximizing ethos, the environmental constraints of sugar production in Louisiana, and the slaveholders' paternalistic ideology shaped the experiences of both master and slave. Follett's discussion of the slaveholders' demographic manipulation of the slave labor force demonstrates that the sugar masters practiced an insidious form of slave breeding. His examination of slaveholding management and the organization of plantation routine likewise proves that sugar planters enthusiastically incorporated technological innovations and modes of organizing labor more akin to factories than to farms in order to optimize both efficiency and profits. And his exploration of the psychological world of both master and slave shows how the paternalistic character of the master-slave relationship existed alongside the slaveholders' capitalistic ethos even as it allowed the slaves to pursue the goal of greater cultural autonomy. All of these points are made cogently and effectively, and they are firmly rooted in a meticulous examination of a wide array of primary source documents and in a comprehensive understanding of the secondary literature and scholarly debates.

Follett's work, in fact, is one of the latest in a series of studies on slavery in the ante-bellum South that has attempted to bridge the historiographical divide between those scholars who emphasize the differences between a capitalist North and paternalist South, thus insisting upon the inevitability of the Civil War, and those who see the South as essentially capitalist and who thus deny the notion of an impending crisis. Follett makes an important addition to this welcome development. The paternalism-capitalism debate has often seemed stilted, and, even to the degree that it expressed legitimate scholarly differences, by the early 1990s it had reached something of a dead end. Advocates on both sides in recent years have pursued a historiographical middle ground, and works such as Follett's have sought to reconcile the two perspectives as a way of providing a more nuanced understanding of the slave South and of the slaveholders.

That being said, however, the larger implications of Follett's argument, especially as it pertains to the slaves, raises certain questions. Follett insists that not only did slaves on Louisiana sugar plantations use paternalism to create for themselves a host of customary privileges, but they also accepted their masters' system of market-oriented incentives, and that by doing so they were able to negotiate with their owners over the selling of their labor power. In effect, slaves acted, at least to a degree, as free laborers. Indeed, Follett goes so far as to argue that slaves internalized the values of the capitalistic marketplace, including that of acquisitive individualism, and that the very process of internalizing these values enabled masters to wrangle out of slaves their maximal productive capacity. This argument resembles the one aspect of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman's Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974) that received perhaps the most withering criticism, and it begs the question of how slaves could have negotiated anything. Follett is careful to note that masters ultimately had total power over their slaves, and yet he refers to “the slaves' ownership of their labor” (p. 201), “the slaves' right to their own labor” (p. 217), and practices that “commodified their labor power” (p. 218). It is axiomatic that even the most brutally oppressive and tyrannical of regimes allows its victims some minimal social space, but the question then becomes what significance do scholars attribute to such space. The literature on slavery has established an element of reciprocity between master and slave, yet slavery was essentially a coercive labor system, rooted in violence and in the unquestioned domination of one person over another. There was nothing about slavery in the Old South that even remotely resembled noncoercive or voluntary labor.

Follett seems intent on establishing the continuity between Old South and New South by denying the significance of emancipation. Discussing emancipation as the great divide in southern history, he states that “no such rubicon existed” (p. 235). For years scholars have pondered the question of “how new was the New South,” with some arguing that the New South's social relations were so oppressive as to make them indistinguishable from those of the slave South. Follett appears to contribute to this interpretation by adding as a corollary that certain features scholars ordinarily associate with the New South—the commodification of labor power, the bargaining between workers and capitalists over the value of that labor power, the emergence of a marketplace to mediate those negotiations, and the struggle by African Americans to reap the fruits of their own labor—can be identified in the Old South. Although Follett's interpretation offers an important corrective to what is sometimes seen as a romanticized portrait of antebellum southern slaveholders, especially those in the Louisiana sugar region, its applicability to the slaves and to the master-slave relationship leaves one wondering what was so old about the Old South.