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

The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery explores how, in an age of industry and abolition, ambitious planters in the Upper US South, Cuba, and Brazil expanded slavery by collaborating with a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other plantation experts to assist them in adapting the technologies of the Industrial Revolution to suit tropical needs.The period of the second slavery was marked by geographic expansion of zones of slavery into the Upper US South, Cuba and Brazil and chronological expansion into the industrial age.As The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery shows, ambitious planters throughout the Greater Caribbean hired a transnational group of chemists, engineers, and other plantation experts to assist them in adapting industrial technologies to suit their tropical needs and increase profitability. Not only were technologies reinvented so as to keep manufacturing processes local but slaveholders' adaptation of new racial ideologies also shaped their particular usage of new machines. Finally, these businessmen forged a new set of relationships with one another in order to sidestep the financial dominance of Great Britain and the northeastern United States.In addition to promoting new forms of mechanization, the technical experts depended on the know-how of slaves alongside whom they worked. Bondspeople with industrial craft skills played key roles in the development of new production processes and technologies like sugar mills. While the very existence of such skilled slaves contradicted prevailing racial ideologies and allowed black people to wield power in their own interest, their contributions grew the slave economies of Cuba, Brazil, and the Upper South. Together reform-minded planters, technical experts, and enslaved people modernized sugar plantations in Louisiana and Cuba; brought together rural Virginia wheat planters and industrial flour-millers in Richmond with the coffee-planting system of southeastern Brazil; and enabled engineerslSE