Slavery and plantation capitalism in Louisiana's sugar country

Sugar planters in the antebellum South managed their estates progressively, efficiently, and with a political economy that reflected the emerging capitalist values of nineteenth‐century America. By fusing economic progress and slave labor, sugar planters revolutionized the means of production and transformed the institution of slavery. Slaveholders and bondspeople redefined the parameters of paternalism and recast the master‐slave relationship along a novel path. Louisiana slaves accommodated the machine, holding no torch for Luddism while concurrently shaping the agro‐industrial revolution to achieve modest economic independence and relative autonomy within the plantation quarters.     

‘Various Means of Providing for Their Own Tables’: Comparing Slave Family Economies in the Antebellum South

Recent scholarship has changed our understanding of African‐American slaves’ experiences by shifting our focus from the external factors of slavery (what slavery did to men and women in bondage) to slave agency (slaves’ determination in creating their own autonomous culture). While this has been a positive development, there is a danger in forgetting the framework within which slave culture was created. This article seeks a middle ground by examining the ways in which certain external factors of slavery determined the extent to which slave families could develop internal economies and engage in independent production. Comparing slave families’ experiences in three distinct cash crop regions of the antebellum South, this study’s findings indicate that the varied nature of work patterns and crop‐specific labor incentives in different regions served to either encourage or thwart the development of slave family economies.     

Missionaries,Evangelical Identity,and the Religious Ecology of Early Nineteenth‐Century South Carolina and the British Caribbean

This article examines a critical question that fraught contemporaries throughout the Atlantic system in the early nineteenth century: could slavery be ameliorated and, thus, by implication, could slaves be ‘improved’? Despite strong eighteenth‐century connections through trade and as provincial outposts of the British Empire, South Carolina and the British Caribbean differed markedly on this issue by the early 1800s. But the reasons for this divergence cannot be adequately explained by the effects of the American Revolution. South Carolina slaveholders believed that slavery could be ameliorated through the adoption of evangelicalism. West Indian proprietors, however, believed that the introduction of evangelical religion among their slaves would only incite them to rebel. Thus, evangelical missionaries were often crucial figures in defining the character of slaveholding societies in South Carolina and the West Indies. These missionaries illustrated South Carolinians' paternalistic, benevolent sense of a permanent slave society, while itinerants in the West Indies described a violent, lawless, and temporary society beyond the pale of British standards of civility and humanitarianism.     

From the Panama Canal to Post‐Fordism: Producing Temporary Labor Migrants Within and Beyond Agriculture in the United States (1904–2013)

In the historical study of modern American capitalism, labor unfreedom in agriculture has been conceptualized as an exception to liberal labor relations in the post‐slavery polity, from debt peonage to the threat of deportation from workplaces populated by non‐citizen migrants. At the same time, state‐enforced labor compulsions and restrictions are increasingly part and parcel of what scholars call neoliberal exceptionalism. This article argues that agricultural and neoliberal exceptionalisms are related, by tracing the historical genealogy and juridical production of a restrictive work status, the deportable temporary labor migrant, across political economies in the modern United States, from imperial construction in the Panama Canal Zone, to agriculture, to the knowledge economy. Contrary to existing notions of temporary work visas as a new form of unfreedom in neoliberalized advanced capitalist states, I show how the threat of deportation is older and rooted in the rise of the liberal regulatory state in a post‐slavery, yet persistently racial capitalist political economy. The import of understanding this history of government intervention increases as the liberal regulatory state's coercive logics and practices intensify and circulate in agriculture and under a post‐Fordist regime of accumulation, reproducing racial capitalism in the labor process.     

Reflections on the History and Historians of the black woman’s role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence

Taking as points of inspiration Peter Parish’s 1989 book, Slavery: History and Historians, and Angela Davis’s seminal 1971 article, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” this probes both historiographically and methodologically some of the challenges faced by historians writing about the lives of enslaved women through a case study of intimate partner violence among enslaved people in the antebellum South. Because rape and sexual assault have been defined in the past as non-consensual sexual acts supported by surviving legal evidence (generally testimony from court trials), it is hard for historians to research rape and sexual violence under slavery (especially marital rape) as there was no legal standing for the rape of enslaved women or the rape of any woman within marriage. This article suggests enslaved women recognized that black men could both be perpetrators of sexual violence and simultaneously be victims of the system of slavery. It also argues women stoically tolerated being forced into intimate relationships, sometimes even staying with “husbands” imposed upon them after emancipation.     

Creole Cultures of the Caribbean: Historical Archaeology in the French West Indies

Historical archaeology is a relatively recent development in the French West Indies, in contrast to the Anglophone Americas where for over 30 years, historical archaeologists have investigated the sites of plantation villages in the United States and in the Caribbean to seek insights into the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted to and survived the horrors of slavery, and created unique and vibrant Creole cultures. Although plantations have been archaeologically investigated in the former French possessions of the United States, their Caribbean counterparts, and particularly the enslaved population who labored on them, have only recently become a focus of archaeological research. Yet the historical setting and development of plantation slavery in the French colonies of the Caribbean was necessarily distinct from both the British Caribbean and from North American French colonial establishments. This paper discusses the state of historical archaeology in the French West Indies, with particular reference to plantation archaeology in Guadeloupe and Martinique. This research identifies some of the unique aspects of the economic and historical context of slavery on French Caribbean plantations.     

On the Performativity of Pill Pricing: Theory and Reality in the Economics of Global Pharmaceuticalization

One often‐highlighted contemporary phenomenon in the pharmaceuticals industry is the use of “tiered pricing”, where essential medicines are sold more cheaply in low‐income than high‐income countries to widen access. With economists having for decades championed the applicability of such pricing to pharmaceuticals, this could be interpreted as a textbook case of “economic performativity”—the economic world increasingly conforming to economic models. In reality, however, tiered pharmaceutical pricing remains rare. Yet this article nonetheless urges retention of the performativity concept, albeit suitably reworked. For, insofar as the industry demonstrates nominal commitment to the model and to the social principles associated with it, it performs valuable political work. Moreover, it does help perform the pharmaceutical economy, by reproducing it in its existing form: repeatedly questioning the model's workability, Western manufacturers are able to continue to avoid putting it widely into practice and, in the process, jeopardizing the profits generated by conventional pricing.     

Statisticians,economists and the ‘new economic order’ in wartime Italy (1940–1943)

From 1940 to 1943, Italian economists and statisticians were actively engaged in discussions that ranged from immediate concerns about war economy to more speculative issues that can be summarized under the then-fashionable label of the ‘new economic order’. The purpose of this article is to offer an overview of these debates by focusing, on the one hand, on the related themes of autarky, the new ‘Mediterranean order’ and postwar supranational economic complexes, and, on the other hand, on those of corporatism and economic planning. Both the idea of an economic plan and that of an organized division of labor among countries within a politically defined large economic space clashed directly with views associated with the tenets of economic liberalism, also dear to many Italian economists. On each theme, positions taken may be connected to expectations regarding the postwar world. Special attention will be given to various statistical devices and arguments put forward by protagonists to sustain their views or implement their projects.     

The Memory of Slavery at Saint Louis University

This essay examines both the history and memory of slavery at Saint Louis University (SLU). The essay argues that, despite the fact that slavery and slaves featured prominently in the university's early history, later members of the SLU and St. Louis community have forgotten or misremembered the role of human bondage in the school's past. This process of forgetting is particularly notable given the fact that SLU is a Jesuit University that plays a prominent role in the cultural, educational, and economic life of the city of St. Louis. The essay will analyze the process by which the role of slavery at SLU has been forgotten before concluding with suggestions for how the topic might be treated in the future.     

State functioning and state failure in the South Pacific

The South Pacific region features enormous variation in state performance. While Polynesian nations such as Samoa have proved to be relatively successful post-colonial states, Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands are increasingly categorised as 'weak', 'failing' or 'failed' states. Drawing on a range of comparative studies by economists and political scientists in recent years, this article argues that cross-country variation in ethnic diversity between much of Polynesia and Melanesia is a key factor in explaining differences in state performance across the South Pacific. It shows how different kinds of ethnic structure are associated with specific political and economic outcomes, including variation in political stability, economic development, and internal conflict from country to country. In so doing, it helps explain why some parts of the South Pacific appear to be failing while others are relative success stories - and why this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.     

Epidemiologists explain pellagra: gender,race, and political economy in the work of Edgar Sydenstricker

Between 1900 and 1940, at least 100,000 individuals in the southern United States died of pellagra, a dietary deficiency disease. Although half of these pellagra victims were African-American and more than two-thirds were women, contemporary observers paid little attention to these gender and racial differences in their analyses of disease. This article reviews the classic epidemiological studies of Joseph Goldberger and Edgar Sydenstricker, who argued that pellagra was deeply rooted in the political economy of cotton monoculture in the South. The methods that Sydenstricker brought to epidemiology from early work on political economy obscured the role of gender inequalities in pellagra, and his focus on economic underdevelopment led him to ignore the prominent role of African-Americans as pellagra's principal victims. Research methods and traditions, no less than more overt ideologies, played a role in maintaining the subordinate social position of women and African-Americans in the southern United States.     

Relies of reconciliation: the Confederate Museum and Civil War memory in the New South

This article examines the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS), an organization of elite white women in Richmond, Virginia who founded the Confederate Museum in the 1890s. Faced with the plunder of Civil War relics and cultural homogenization on northern terms, the CMLS founded the Confederate Museum to document and defend the Confederate cause and to uphold the antebellum mores that the New South's business ethos threatened to erode. In the end, however, the museum's version of the Lost Cause served the New South. By focusing on military sacrifice, the Confederate Museum aided the process of sectional reconciliation. By depicting slavery as benevolent, the museum's exhibits reinforced the notion that Jim Crow was a just and effective means of managing postwar southern society. Lastly, by glorifying the common soldier and portraying the South as "solid," the museum promoted obedience to the mandates of industrial capitalism. Thus, the Confederate Museum both critiqued and eased the economic transformations of the New South.     

Multiple Trajectories: A Critique of Industrial Restructuring and the New Institutionalism

This article argues that the agrarian studies literature sheds new light on the multiple,nonlinear trajectories of capitalist development occurring in the context of accelerating global integration. Cast in relation to classical political economy, work on agrarian change is centrally concerned with multiple paths of agrarian transformation. It attends both to historically specificforms of social property relations and to the ways that struggles over resources and labor are simultaneously struggles over culturally constructed meanings, definitions, and identities. Accordingly, it goes well beyond the "new institutionalism" that figures prominently in the literature on industrial restructuring. The article draws on recent research in globally linked industrial districts in former bantustan areas of South Africa to illustrate thecontemporary and continuing salience of agrarian histories and concepts. It also suggests how attention to multiple trajectories of sociospatial change can be used to challenge the neoliberal orthodoxy taking hold in post-apartheid South Africa.     

Pickets,Protests and Purses in the American Civil Rights Movement

At first glance, perhaps nothing seems more mundane and apolitical than a purse. But purses have always been much more than a fashion accessory. This article analyses how southern Black women – both the legendary and the lesser known – in the ‘classical’ phase of the Civil Rights Movement used purses to appear as respectable ladies' when their dress and comportment were under close surveillance. Yet they simultaneously used their purses as private, female-controlled spaces that aided them in achieving a wide variety of social, economic and political objectives. In fact, many southern Black women used their purses to hide critical items needed to prepare themselves and protect their bodies as they voted, sat-in, rode on public transportation and integrated schools. Using oral histories, memoirs, newspaper and magazine stories and photographs, this article argues that Black southern female activists used purses primarily as ‘toolkits’. In the process, it reveals that Black southern women's participation in the armed self-defence movement is far more significant than scholars have appreciated.     

Race,slavery, and the expression of sexual violence in Louisa Picquet,the Octoroon

ABSTRACT

Historically, victims of sexual violence have rarely left written accounts of their abuse, so while sexual violence has long been associated with slavery in the United States, historians have few accounts from formerly enslaved people who experienced it first-hand. Through a close reading of the narrative of Louisa Picquet, a survivor of sexual violence in Georgia and Louisiana, this article reflects on the recovery of evidence of sexual violence under slavery through amanuensis-recorded testimony, the unintended evidence of survival within the violent archive of female slavery, and the expression of “race” as an authorial device through which to demonstrate the multigenerational nature of sexual victimhood.     

South Africa's Current Transition in Temporal and Spatial Context

This article analyses South Africa's current postapartheid transition in the light of earlier transformations of its social and economic order. The first of these prior transformations is the abolition of slavery and the shift to liberal capitalism, which took place in the early nineteenth century. The second is the rapid industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each of these transformations, as well as the current transition, is explained as being partly the outcome of a broad shift in capitalist practice, innovated in the metropoles of the global economy. Due to South Africa's situation within global economic networks, each of these shifts, at different times, raised the threat of a dislocation in South Africa's prevailing social order. However, each prior transformation and, it will be argued, the current transition, has been 'managed' by established elites so as to ensure minimal change to the overall distribution of privilege. This conservative 'management' of shifts in capitalist practice, it is suggested, has been facilitated through South African elites' historic engagement with cultural discourses circulating across a global terrain. In this article then, contemporary South Africa is located within both material and discursive networks which have historically influenced the country's distribution of privilege.     

Correcting Europe's political economy: The virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid

The article provides an analysis of Georg Ludwig Schmid's ‘Reflexions sur l’Agriculture’, which was published as the first essay in the first issue of the publications of the Oeconomical Society of Berne, founded in 1759. Schmid connected the agricultural improvement movement of the time to the logic of international power competition that caused the 7 Years’ War and wished to preserve political economy as agronomy for the cause of peace and virtuous economic progress. In his essay on commerce and luxury, he devised a patriotic political economy based on the notion of a marche naturelle, or a natural progress of opulence, which enabled statesmen and political economists to separate the productive from the pathological features of economic development, healthy and necessary growth from luxury. Adam Smith deployed a similar model in the Wealth of Nations but argued that Europe's retrograde development was so fundamental and comprehensive that it made it impossible to use this kind of natural progress model on its own as a meaningful guide for comprehensive economic and political reform.     

Correcting Europe's political economy: The virtuous eclecticism of Georg Ludwig Schmid

The article provides an analysis of Georg Ludwig Schmid's ‘Reflexions sur l’Agriculture’, which was published as the first essay in the first issue of the publications of the Oeconomical Society of Berne, founded in 1759. Schmid connected the agricultural improvement movement of the time to the logic of international power competition that caused the 7 Years’ War and wished to preserve political economy as agronomy for the cause of peace and virtuous economic progress. In his essay on commerce and luxury, he devised a patriotic political economy based on the notion of a marche naturelle, or a natural progress of opulence, which enabled statesmen and political economists to separate the productive from the pathological features of economic development, healthy and necessary growth from luxury. Adam Smith deployed a similar model in the Wealth of Nations but argued that Europe's retrograde development was so fundamental and comprehensive that it made it impossible to use this kind of natural progress model on its own as a meaningful guide for comprehensive economic and political reform.     

Geography and the study of Third World underdevelopment re-revisited

Progress in development geography has been recently associated with the shift of the perspective on underdevelopment from a right-wing, conservative standpoint to a leftward, liberal-radical position. Marxism often conceals its message in obscure rhetoric with moral overtones on colonialism, slavery, poverty, and underdevelopment. Liberal academics have lamely acceded to the dogmas of this once-assertive ideology. Marxist view have exerted a stimulus on debates, but could not provide answers to the issues of this discipline. The hopes of development and prosperity a generation ago have evaporated only to be replaced by news of economic malaise, the food crisis, and crushing debt. In the late 1980's geographers addressed Third World environmental issues. Blaikie and Brookfield examined environmental deterioration among elements of the population-environment issue. Lewis and Berry dealt with African environments and resources. Watts and Bassett touched on agrarian and political concerns in West Africa. Adams examined water resources development in Nigeria's Sokoto Valley. Bryceson analyzed the political economy of agriculture in Tanzania. Lawson depicted how government policy bore on agriculture and its regional pattern. Crush detailed the absorption of Swazi labor into the South African economy. Dayal described the deficiency diet of agricultural workers in Bangladesh. Others examined Africa's financial disaster, Japan's trade surplus, and the global population crisis. Nevertheless, the dearth of output on and neglect of Third World issues by human geographers awaits positive research publications.