Industrialization and slavery in The Sugar Masters

            Our conversation this week touched upon a lot of the ideas that have been circulating throughout this semester. One of our major critiques of this book was that it seemed to cover theoretical and ideological ground with which we were already familiar. The notion that slavery and capitalism were not polar opposites is something that we have talked a lot about in our discussions this semester, and there were questions raised as to whether Follett was bringing new insight into this concept, or simply applying it to a different location and context.

        In addressing this question, it was important to keep in mind that our understanding of the interrelation of these two economic systems is significantly more nuanced, courtesy of HIST1970f, than most people who think about American history. For some readers, then, the clear and careful laying out of the argument of new methods of industrialization alongside long-held dynamics of slavery would have come as more of a surprise than it may have for us.

            For us, too, I think this book served an important purpose. For one thing, it is not simply a repetition of concepts we have already come across. The Louisiana sugar plantations were significantly different from both their southern U.S. and their Caribbean contemporaries. These differences suggest a particular notion of the sugar growing class as a category designed with absolute parameters of race. If free workers could not join the ranks of sugar plantation slaves, even when their manpower was greatly needed, this raises the question of whether Louisiana slaves actually constituted a class.

            Our attention to the distinction between slave labor and wage labor was complex and important. We discussed the striking similarities between the two systems, as well as examining the potential outcomes of highlighting those similarities. I think we came to the crux of the issue in noting that slavery is qualitatively different from wage labor, and that describing the two as interchangeable is a hugely problematic and inaccurate task. At the same time, though, taking note of the similarities without demanding that we equate wage labor with slavery gives us a lens with which we can integrate the industrializing and modernizing tendencies of Louisiana sugar plantations alongside their rigid and racially non-negotiable understanding of slavery.

            This discussion’s relation with agency is where it really gets hairy. Follett takes some major risks in describing slaves as complicit in their own enslavement, while at the same time, valorizing slaves’ agency over their acquiescence risks implying that slavery was not actually the cruel and inhuman system that it was. Agency is even more complex when it includes the agency of planter classes. Follett periodically tosses in a sentence that the slaveholders believed their own façade and rhetoric about paternalism. This unqualified psychological assessment throws the argument of slave compliance into perhaps unintentional contrast, and seems to further the implicit blaming of slaves for their own enslavement. 

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