A lot of historical work has been done trying show how wage labor can be equated to slavery. Follett’s book The Sugar Masters interestingly takes on the inverse; it shows us slavery's resemblance to wage-labor. Both of these lines of thought lead us to the conclusion that wage labor and slavery have as much if not more in common than they have apart. In making this argument historians highlight individual instances where slaves may have had it better off than wage laborers. Follett argues that the plight of the skilled slave receiving some compensation for his or her labor could be better than the plight of the wage-laborer because the skilled slave had a real prospect of improving his or her lot, “the proletarianization of workers that assured a downward trajectory in the white working experience operated in the reverse for skilled slaves who could translate their skills into upward advancement” (127). With the assumption of unfreedom, any sliver of individual autonomy is an improvement, whereas the wage-laborer’s reality contradicts the façade of legal freedom. In Scraping By, Rockman advocates at times that in terms of material existence, the lives of slaves and other dependents (like people living in alms-houses) were easier than those working for wages they could not survive on. That said, how should we define freedom in the context of the last two books we have read? Is there really a difference between material freedom and legal freedom? How do we employ the concept of freedom to better understand class?
I would also like to talk about the relationship between culture and economy in Follett’s book. He argues that the sugar masters, “effectively balanced their capitalist pretensions with a social ethic that celebrated their independent mastery of an economic, social, and racial world” (8)—that they balanced new economy with old culture. In order to make this argument he often references times when capitalist thinking wins out over old southern culture, or visa versa—sometimes masters bought slaves based on what would be profitable in the long-run, other times based on sexualized southern notions of the ideal slave. While I do not doubt the hybridity of culture and capitalism, I think that when Follett sets up his arguments in this manner, attributing actions and decisions to either culture or economy, he separates them as two discrete things: “profit-conscious capitalists…could not divorce themselves from their idealized notion of mastery or their perceived commitment to the slaves’ welfare” (183). Here Follett seems to be arguing that southern paternalism runs contradictory to rational capitalist thought and that it prevented the sugar masters from being good capitalists. Throughout the book I think he undermines the distinction between economy and culture by showing how the planters commercial, capitalist sensibilities developed within their culture not in competition with it. I think that we should be wary of separating historical events into ones that are culturally determined or economically determined because it implies that these forces are entirely distinct rather than linked and dependent on one another.
Lastly I would like to talk about the discussion of slave resistance within the text, particularly in relation to Walter Johnson’s comments in his essay On Agency. Johnson comments that too often, humanity, agency and resistance are conflated in historians’ descriptions of slavery. How would Johnson feel about Follett’s treatment of slave agency and resistance, particularly the collective cultural resistance described in the final chapter, and the economic resistance that in the end “accommodated the machine and their masters’ economic agenda”?
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