The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean

Abstract

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery introduces agricultural history into discussions regarding the vitality of capitalism within transnational slavery during the nineteenth century. Throughout this book, Daniel B. Rood offers a reading of how racialized bodies linked with specific technological skills as dynamic plantation systems altered to accommodate capitalist and industrial changes to slave systems. He specifically explores how desires in the 1830s and 1840s for increased material output in Cuba transformed slave systems due to varying fits and starts of industrial progress. With this assertion, he follows numerous scholars who have searched the fragile and dynamic links between capitalism and slavery after the Haitian Rebellion. In positing these connections, Rood widens the transnational lens of slave studies through exploring economic relations between the U.S. South, Cuba, and Brazil. These associations, between southern wheat crops, Cuban sugar planters, and Brazilian coffee expansion, tied the Atlantic world tighter during the “second slavery.”