Daniel B. Rood's The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is a smart, creative, and often absorbing study of how business operators, technologies, and commodities maintained slavery and connected the broader Caribbean during much of the nineteenth century. Although Rood overuses white sugar as a metaphor for ideas about racial purity, most of the evidence for his other arguments are rather convincing. Rood makes a strong case for viewing parts of Virginia, Cuba, and Brazil as a slavery-driven “single economic-technological block within the wider Atlantic world” (7). He demonstrates clearly that creole experts influenced science, technology, and business in significant ways, countering narratives that paint Latin American and Caribbean residents as passive absorbers of science and technology. He also shows that the regular use of slave knowledge and labour in the operation of new, more sophisticated technological systems contradicted claims that black Americans possessed limited mental capacities. What is perhaps most impressive is Rood's ability to discuss these complex issues while also including captivating descriptions of the technologies involved in sugar, iron, and flour production. There are few histories of technology existing that can compete with Rood's creativity and descriptive prose.
Rood's research particularly shines when he discusses the “creolization” of European technologies and the multidirectional spread of technologies, experts, concepts, and designs. Cubans became prominent global voices in the milling and chemistry of sugar, especially as it pertained to its production in the tropics. Rood discusses how Cuban chemist José Luis Casaseca took his European counterparts to task over their ignorance of how the Caribbean climate affected the chemical processes involved in sugar production. Cubans also made many significant contributions to sugar-generating equipment. Rood shows how “West Point-trained southerners with experience laying out [railroad] tracks, bridges, and tunnels in ‘tropical climates’ replaced many English engineers on new lines in Cuba” (94). These U.S. southerners interested in doing business in the Caribbean played up their relatively-close geographic connection and their experience with working with black slave labour as a means of gaining lucrative business deals over Yankee and British competitors. According to Rood, business opportunities provided by successful Caribbean exporters, in addition to increasing American appetites for sugar products and coffee, drew Virginia iron producers to Cuba and flour salesmen to Brazil more than schemes based on an “aggressive pro-slavery expansion into a neo-colonial Caribbean” (112). This extensive Caribbean network, in good part, based on slave labour and slave knowledge, fuelled the reinvention of what Rood and several other scholars refer to as the “second slavery”.
Slavery, as is well known, was justified by white claims of black inferiority. But reliance on the heads and hands of Africans and their descendants across the Americas slowly undermined this false contention. A number of the Brazilian bakers who desired the particular qualities of Virginia flower relied on slave labour. Escaped slaves and freedmen became critical bakers in their own right. Slave owners and managers eager to find greater workforce flexibility and to save money turned to slaves to operate new machinery at low costs. This situation was particularly true in Virginia, wherein the wheat fields slaves operated new harvesters, and in iron factories, slaves handled machines for manufacturing. In the Tredegar Iron Works, for example, managers turned to slaves to work rolling mill jobs that had been previously monopolized by white workers, leading to a significant strike in 1847. The Caribbean networks of trade that these iron goods helped create in turn fuelled economic growth and technological developments that also involved slave knowledge and labour.
Rood's most provocative and perhaps most exciting argument is also his weakest. He argues that “racial blackness and its biological particularities came to be used as the overarching model for mid-nineteenth century sugar chemistry's understanding of microscopic life in the boiling pan” (44). Rood contends that concerns about the preservation of white sugar connected to fears among white planters and sugar processors that large black populations would degenerate their “primordial whiteness”. The commonalities in the discourses about white sugar and racial whiteness are strikingly similar, and they probably influenced each other. But Rood presents little in the way of direct evidence showing that racial conceptions ungirded sugar science. He presents less evidence still when it comes to other products that undoubtedly would have been influenced by similar racial ideologies, such as white flour or black coffee. Nonetheless, the parallel is intriguing enough to warrant further investigation, and it makes for a creative and fascinating literary device in Rood's writing.
And the writing and overall construction of the book is impressive. Rood incorporates an array of high-quality illustrations and maps of the peoples, places, and technologies he discusses. Most impressive is Rood's ability to weave this complex narrative of slavery and interchange together with histories of technological development. The story is easy to follow, and the connections are clear. More often than not, accounts of technology are dry, and the technical jargon involved is off-putting for students and general readers who are not techno-enthusiasts. Rood's work is a pleasant exception. He makes the inner workings of sugar equipment come to life in smart but clear prose that connects the machines to individuals, environments, and cultural beliefs. Many of my students will enjoy the book as much as I have.
