Sugar Masters Framing Essay

Throughout reading Sugar Masters I couldn’t help but think back to Rockman’s Scraping By from last week as I noticed how well these two works complement each other. Last week, Rockman showed that slavery was an integral part of Baltimore’s emerging wage labor system, and that slaves were both active and constrained members of the market economy. This week Follett extends the notion of hybridization to the sugar plantation, arguing that sugar masters, in their quest for profit, turned their plantations into factory-like operations. While in some ways this led masters to treat slaves like employees (for example, providing money for overtime work), masters continued to maintain their dominance (and ownership) of the bodies of both male and female slaves. The works are complementary because they each break down the dichotomy between the entrepreneurial values of the market and the supposedly anti-capitalist institution of slavery, and show instead how slavery was molded and reshaped (but not broken) in order to best serve the masters in an emerging capitalist economy.

I was especially struck by Follett’s descriptions of master-slave negotiations, and the ways in which these negotiations look strikingly similar to the master-laborer negotiations in emerging industrial factories of the north. Most notably, I was interested in his discussion of how masters used “overwork” and Christmas bonuses to deepen slaves’ dependence and inspire them to work harder, while the masters continued to benefit from what slaves produced “in their own time.” I couldn’t help but feel that Follett was implicitly asking the reader to make the jump to wage labor: isn’t overtime pay – a practice we demand from employers because it is “just” – simply a way for employers to make regularly underpaid workers more dependent on extra hours, more productive, and less likely to have time to “cause problems”? Follett’s history, like all of the authors we have read this semester, speaks not only to the past but to the present as well.

Still, I’m skeptical of a view that equates wage labor with slavery, and I would be interested to discuss in class how to define the differences and boundaries between these two methods of organizing labor. In other words, are the hybrid systems of early 19th century Baltimore and Louisiana simply a reflection of transition from one system to the other – masters trying to hold onto parts of the past as the world around them moves to capitalism? And if so, what are the most important aspects of the turn? Is wage labor simply a northern reproduction of slavery without the objectionable trading in human bodies? Or, as Follett and Rockman seem to suggest, if capitalism and slavery are actually mutually constitutive in some cases, how can we distinguish between the experience of the laborer and the experience of the slave? Follett seems to provide some hints in his continued reminders of the use of the whip, the attempts at human breeding, and other mechanisms of control which may not have been available to industrialist employers in the north. Are there others?

Finally, I was intrigued by Follett’s discussion of the “clock-driven labor regime” (108). He argues that because the success of sugar plantations relied so much on their productivity as a function of time, masters instituted shifts and divisions of labor. By tying their slaves’ work to the clock, masters asserted dominance not only over their slaves’ bodies but over their conception of time as well. I’m interested in how exactly this new sense of “time management,” which we are so tied to today, forms the basis for a capitalist system. Though none of our previous authors have relied explicitly on this concept, it seems to me that a notion of the value of time underlies the emerging capitalist market just as much as, say, the expansion of writing or the emergence of evangelical religion. And if so, how does a new conception of time intersect with the discussions about class and class identity we’ve been having? Do different classes adhere to different valuations of time? As capitalism grows, is there a kind of hegemonic imposition of the increased value of time? Can working and lower classes (not just in the US but all over the world) maintain differing conceptions of time in the era of globalization? These questions could form the basis for a fruitful discussion on how the transition to capitalism changed not only economic and social relationships, but philosophical and cultural constructions as well.

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