Susan Dwyer Amussen. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Although the bulk of this monograph concerns life in the Caribbean--specifically the English island colonies of Barbados and Jamaica--it is ultimately a work of English history. Amussen studies the ways in which English encounters with Caribbean slavery altered and shaped subsequent legal and cultural conceptions of liberty, race, and gender.
Slavery was not widely practiced in England prior to the colonial era, and so therefore neither English law nor English custom accounted for the institution when English colonists and adventurers in the Caribbean began turning to African slave labor in order to meet labor needs in the new colonies. The institution of plantation slavery had already been developed by other European powers, from whom the English acquired both the template for turning slave labor into wealth through the production of cash crops (sugar, in this case), and often the slaves themselves. Yet at the same time, these colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen, and tried to align both their notions of social hierarchy and English "liberties" with the challenge of managing slave labor and exercising control over the slave population.
It was not an easy, nor an obvious, process. Amussen admits that it is still a mystery as to why the English adopted slave labor; this book outlines the process but cannot answer the mystery as to why it happened. Traditional English forms of labor relations were based on mutual regard and reciprocity; the aggressively profit-oriented form of industrial capitalism which developed in the sugar islands undermined those bonds, even as wealthy planters tried to maintain the paternalist facade.
But ultimately, the slave society which developed began to cleave along lines of race and gender--the latter informing the former as Black men were denied the freedom and self-determination of masculine identity even as Black women were denied the emerging standards of femininity which became to be exclusively identified with White women. The trope of the delicate, upper-class white women who was desired by the dark-skinned 'other' enters into the Anglo world here.
Amussen goes on to argue that this experience with slavery would inform and shape the industrial Britain's attitude towards the growing factory working class. But her story also has much to say about the early Atlantic world, as her Caribbean slave holders are in ongoing communication with the broader Atlantic world as well as the mother country.
Monday, May 29, 2017
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Revolutionary Backlash
Rosemarie Zagarri. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Traditional histories of political involvement by women generally begin Antebellum reform movements, culminating in the Seneca Falls convention which has long served as the traditional starting point of formal feminism in American history. Without denying the importance of Seneca Falls or the Antebellum feminist movement in general, Zaggari argues that that particular "feminist moment" is best understood not as the birth of a new level of activism by women, but rather as the culmination of decades of prior political activity by women, and the reaction which ultimately limited it. The Early Republic had been a period in which white women had a much higher degree of public participation in political life than subsequent generations would be accorded. The reasons why that was, and why women lost that freedom of participation, are tied to the role in which race and gender defined full citizenship in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian years.
Women in the early Republic had many concerns about their rights--"rights" much more broadly defained than suffrage. The language of the Revolution was universal in scope, and just as African-Americans used that language to argue for full inclusion in the polity after independence, so did white women argue that civil law, family law, and other social and legal strictures required their consent just as the Revolution itself had laid claim to legitimacy based on the consent of the governed.
For a time, there was room and even encouragement for female participation in the political realm, even if most white men resisted the revolutionary logic of extending freedom and equality to women and African-Americans. Female patriots gave legitimacy to Revolutionary and Whig rhetoric And during the early national period there was initially a generally welcoming attitude towards "female politicians" speaking and writing on behalf of Federalist and Republican positions. However, involving women in partisan politics threatened their gendered role as protectors of social morality and private, domestic harmony. The quest to push women out of politics began.
Within a few decades it succeeded, so much so that by the late 1820's many older women found that they could surprise their daughters and granddaughters by explaining that in their youth women were allowed and sometimes even encouraged to take independent positions on political matters and even enter the public sphere while doing so.
Traditional histories of political involvement by women generally begin Antebellum reform movements, culminating in the Seneca Falls convention which has long served as the traditional starting point of formal feminism in American history. Without denying the importance of Seneca Falls or the Antebellum feminist movement in general, Zaggari argues that that particular "feminist moment" is best understood not as the birth of a new level of activism by women, but rather as the culmination of decades of prior political activity by women, and the reaction which ultimately limited it. The Early Republic had been a period in which white women had a much higher degree of public participation in political life than subsequent generations would be accorded. The reasons why that was, and why women lost that freedom of participation, are tied to the role in which race and gender defined full citizenship in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian years.
Women in the early Republic had many concerns about their rights--"rights" much more broadly defained than suffrage. The language of the Revolution was universal in scope, and just as African-Americans used that language to argue for full inclusion in the polity after independence, so did white women argue that civil law, family law, and other social and legal strictures required their consent just as the Revolution itself had laid claim to legitimacy based on the consent of the governed.
For a time, there was room and even encouragement for female participation in the political realm, even if most white men resisted the revolutionary logic of extending freedom and equality to women and African-Americans. Female patriots gave legitimacy to Revolutionary and Whig rhetoric And during the early national period there was initially a generally welcoming attitude towards "female politicians" speaking and writing on behalf of Federalist and Republican positions. However, involving women in partisan politics threatened their gendered role as protectors of social morality and private, domestic harmony. The quest to push women out of politics began.
Within a few decades it succeeded, so much so that by the late 1820's many older women found that they could surprise their daughters and granddaughters by explaining that in their youth women were allowed and sometimes even encouraged to take independent positions on political matters and even enter the public sphere while doing so.
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