This book develops three recent, growing, and related themes in the study of slavery in the Americas. The first is the significance of the “internal economy” of the slave community. Attention to this aspect of slave life was initiated by the conference “Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas” held at the University of Maryland in 1989, whose proceedings were published in a volume of the same title edited by Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan (1993). The second theme is an emphasis on the material culture slaves produced; the third is the growth of comparative studies of slavery.
Roderick McDonald’s book is nothing if not true to its exact title. Much of the book—text, tables (18), figures (32), and appendixes (11)—consists of a well-organized compendium and description of what slaves in Jamaica and Louisiana produced, sold, bought, bartered, lived in, wore, slept on, and ate. Drawing on travelers’ accounts, numerous plantation records and inventories, and planter correspondence, the work brings together much of the extant evidence of the independent economic sphere slaves carved out for themselves even under the New World’s most brutal labor regimen, the cultivation of sugarcane. The irony, of course, is that while sugar production required exacting labor, the lulls in its cultivation cycle provided slaves the opportunity to grow their own crops for market and control their own labor, if only temporarily.
But McDonald never quite reconciles the obvious brutality of labor on sugar plantations with his claim that the internal economy “gave slaves a degree of control and independence in tension with the prerequisites for servitude” (p. 78). Nor does he fully evaluate the degree to which this “autonomy” may have found sanction in a planter paternalism that actually reinforced slavery. For example, he suggests that “what [slaves] bought [with their earnings] reflects their independent actions as consumers” (p. 80); but the very plantation records on which this assertion is based (reproduced in appendixes) indicate that planters had control over consumption, as they kept a detailed account of slave purchases.
McDonald clearly has amassed evidence of the considerable ability of slaves in two different cultures to forge an economic and material world apart from their masters, and this is a worthy contribution. Yet a more fully developed comparative perspective would clarify how much the authority and power of the master class impinged on this world in each society. In McDonald’s account, little differentiates the structure of plantation society in southern Louisiana and Jamaica; the commonality of sugar culture appears to be the definitive feature in both places. For the most part he neglects, among other things, the difference between absentee and resident planters, the presence of maroons in Jamaica, the French legal heritage of Louisiana, and the different constraints on slaveholders imposed by a democratic state and a colonial one.
McDonald’s most important observation is that the slaves’ internal economy provided “an independent material basis for their society and culture” (p. 167). Yet, as he frequently notes, this was no uniform process; indeed, one is struck by the resulting stratification of the slave community, as some slaves benefited from independent production and many did not. That slaves locked their cabins did attest to their “de facto status as owners and property holders” (p. 145); but it also suggests that they distrusted their fellow bondspeople. The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves does much to reveal the hidden world of the slaves’ economy— not only within the slave community but between slaves and masters over the allocation of labor and exchange, among masters who disagreed about the scope of independence allowed bondsmen, and between masters and non-slaveholders. As in any society based on coerced labor, the securing and defense of market relations or wage labor by the subaltern class generated contradiction and conflict with potentially transformative results.
