The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery

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Cleverly conceptualized. * William A. Morgan, New West Indian Guide * Rood's brilliant book considers how elite slaveholders across the hemisphere deployed cutting-edge machine technology, storage and transportation infrastructure, and techniques of racial management to consolidate wealth and power in a system threatened by resistance, abolitionism, and the growing hegemony of European and Yankee regimes. * Alice Maggard, Journal of the Early Republic * The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery introduces agricultural history into discussions regarding the vitality of capitalism within transnational slavery during the nineteenth century. Throughout this book, Daniel B. Rood offers a reading of how racialized bodies linked with specific technological skills as dynamic plantation systems altered to accommodate capitalist and industrial changes to slave systems....Rood's significant monograph offers inductive analysis of technological creolization of transnational second slavery from below and provides a broad deductive contribution that links planter concerns with the inversion of white agricultural goods and the decay of the slave system. * Andrew Kettler, Journal of American History * This highly informative book illuminates the impact of technology, competition, and resistance on the major slave economies of the nineteenth-century Americas--those of the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. Daniel Rood vividly conveys how slavery was interwoven with sugar making, wheat growing, flour kneading, cotton baling, railroad construction, maritime navigation, and other laborious and complex processes. He explains how 'racial capitalism' conscripted a captive labor force of African descent, and how the slaveholders exploited the ingenuity and knowledge of their slaves. Industrial methods intensified this slaveholder capitalism. Rood conjures up the true commodity hell of the plantation world, showing that bondage could be, and was, abetted by technical advance and competitive pressures. * Robin Blackburn, Journal of the Civil War Era * Among the many monographs published over the last decade on the topic of'slaveholders' capitalism,' The Reinvention ofAtlantic Slaveryranks among the most accomplished and significant.Numerous scholars have emphasized that plantation-basedsugar cultivation was a 'modern" industrial enterprise.' Rood has developed this insight with a new level of care. This book must be read by anyone with even a passing interest in its subject. * Jonathan Levy, Journal of Southern History * Rood's work reorients scholarly perspectives on the transformation of Atlantic economies in the mid-nineteenth century and the centrality of slavery in this transformation. His rare combination of deep attention to the management decisions of slaveholders and merchants and the labor of enslaved people is laudable and draws together disparate veins of historical research and argument. This book will be of great interest to scholars of slavery and capitalism, economic history, and the history of science and technology. * Michael Becker, Duke University, H NET Rreviews *