...). During this and similar conflicts, which were endemic to the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century, planters were cut off from the food supplies, capital goods and credit they required; as their produce became temporarily worthless and slaves suffered from malnutrition, planters shifted their...

... center of the current slavery debate with the publication of Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. In this essay I hope to dissect and anatomize some of Genovese's central argu• ments, particularly those on planter hegemony and the slaves' internalization of it; raising questions on how...

... narrative collections, the autobiographies of ex-slaves as well as plantation records and the published writings of the planter class, Genovese presents a vivid portrait of the daily struggles of a people, who, under the most difficult of circum• stances, maintained their dignity and constructed a...

... arguments. Cash, as C. Van Woodward has pointed out, drew his vision of the south largely from the yeomanry of North Carolina, while Phillips' south was modeled on the planters of South Carolina.1 Roll, Jordan, Roll (though not all of Geno• vese's work) falls within this pattern. In some ways, the...

... sharecroppers and day laborers whose activities were strictly supervised by a plantation manager. After the cotton was harvested, sharecroppers settled either with the manager or the AFRICAN-AMERICAN STRUGGLES FOR ClTIZENSHIP/35 planter, who added up their commissary bill and...

..., New Jersey: Rutgers Uni- versity Press, 1981. xxv + 356pp. $25.00. Dwight Billings. Planters and the Making of the ‘New South’. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. xiii + 284pp. $15.00. In the last decade, left historians, armed with a revitalized Marxist...

... economy and British colonial officials. The appar- ently insular world of Guyana, a remote promontory on the north- ern tip of South America, was caught in deep and powerful interna- tional currents. Planters, slaves, missionaries, and colonial officials all sought allies in Britain’s Parliament...

... the Beech Island Farmers' Club, a planter organization in Aiken, South Carolina, met in January, 1875, it passed resolutions in- structing members to "prosecute all trespassers and violators of the game laws" and prohibit "tenants and laborers" from keeping "stock of any kind on any enclosed...

.... When the Guatemalan revolutionary junta assumed power in October 194.4 and announced a platform of moderate change, the workers celebrated the news of revolution, believed the language of freedom, and concluded that the hated obligations of plantation labor were a thing of the past. Planters...

... and planters. They show that neither slaves nor planters were very much interested in the ”benefits” of a free capitalistic labor market. While planters sought indentured workers, former slaves pre- ferred to work in Costa Rica because salaries were high enough to allow them to buy a piece of...

.... This is especially true in a brilliant first chapter in which Rodney traces the interaction of ecology and class struggle in defining the way planter and working people experienced the problems of sea defense, drainage and irrigation on the Guyanese coast. Because much of the coastal land...

... to be found in the articles in this issue. Steven Hahn's "Hunting, Fislung, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South" takes as its point of departure a study of the successful agitation mounted by Southern planters in the wake of emancipation to overturn...

..., 21 he argued that planter ideology, as expressed by George Fitzhugh, posed a conservative alternative to the all-pervasive liberalism of nineteenth-century American capitalism. In Roll, Jordan, Roll, of course, Genovese turns his atten• tion to the" slaves themselves. In two...

... desire, and the resilience of the land question in southern state politics. Not only did the avalanche of pardons issued by Johnson to former Confederate leaders in 1865-66 enable planters to reclaim estates, but the Republican legislation that eventually admitted black men to the political...

... Brazil because of a pre-capitalist patriarchal heritage. Yet Sao Paulo’s planters were known as per- haps the most market-oriented, profit-seeking rural entrepreneurs in all of Latin America. Here, slaves were less ”family members’’ than means of production. And here Paulista planters quickly re...

... Atlantic Forest. The ease with which planters gained de facto control of new lands led them to eschew intensive cultivation methods, and led them to destroy primary for- est in a manner that even some contemporaries considered wasteful and shortsighted. Small producers found it virtually impossible...

... them. What one planter called their "wild notions of right and MEANINGOFFREEDOM / 93 freedom" encompassed, first of all, an end to the myriad injustices as- sociated with slavery. Like the Louisiana blacks interviewed by General Banks' agents...

... that these are stories of consequences not causes, symptoms not solutions. The exploited are rendered in moving detail but their exploiters are curiously absent. Planters, millowners, capitalists, and bureaucrats all appear here, but only in passing. The causes of poverty go unnamed. Jones...

.... Planter acquiescence in the open range is perhaps best illustrated by the failure of large landowners to launch a political attack on the open range before the Civil War. Such an attack would have failed in the decades of intense democratic participation that marked the years between 1820 and 1860...

... minimizes the acquisitiveness of southern planters and the extent to which they were complicit in the global capitalist economy; that his portrayal of slavery remains too romantic; that his treatment of the master class appears too reverential; that it fails to...