After Slavery: Emancipation and its Discontents. Edited by Howard Temperley. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Pp. 310. $62.50, cloth; $26.50, paper.

Extract

This book, written for the most part by established authorities in their respective fields, deals with aspects of abolition and its consequences in the Americas, India, and Africa. Writers on the Americas contribute to the ongoing debate over the meaning of freedom by investigating how slaves in the Caribbean and the United States defined freedom, and what the limitations of free status proved to be. The centerpiece of these articles, which also deal with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the British Caribbean, is Carolyn Fick's comprehensive study of emancipation in Haiti. It traces the formulation and gradual implementation (1791–1830s) of the ex-slaves' concept of freedom: to command their own labor, to work their own land, and to sell their own surplus (p. 21). This concept was shared by ex-plantation slaves throughout the British Caribbean, and after 1838 it was realized wherever land was available. But Toussaint L'ouverture (and, in varying degrees, his successors) gave priority to regenerating plantation-based export surpluses to finance and defend the newly established state—and this required enforced gang labor. Curtailment of freedom improved productivity, but in the teeth of popular resistance, laborers bargaining as slaves had done to improve their terms of work, and at the price of creating an unbridgeable gap between the laborers and the state (p. 23). But in the longer run, “the internal logic of revolution from below … triumphed”: Haiti became a peasant-based society (p. 35).