The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery is an illuminating transnational history about transformations in geographies and patterns of work wrought through changes in the production and transport of cane sugar and wheat flour in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The book's subtitle highlights the interplay of technology, labor, and race in slavery's reinvention as plantation capitalism expanded in Cuba, the Upper South of the United States, and parts of Brazil. The author sees the mid-nineteenth century as a period of crisis necessitating innovation by slaveholding capitalists to maintain and expand their positions in Atlantic commodity markets. Rood reveals “multicentered Atlantic networks” of producers and consumers, experts in industrial technology and labor management, and workers, both enslaved and free. In this book commodities, people, and knowledge flow south to north in the Americas, as often as the reverse, or across the Atlantic (2).
Rood's multilayered argument engages with multiple historiographies,...
