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Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990).

Peon.

The word is used today casually, as in, "You don't want to be a peon do you? Go to college!" Or, "You work for the State Department?" "Yes, but I'm just a lowly peon, filing reports."

But peonage--debt servitude--is a real labor arrangement, and southern white landowners have used it for most of the twentieth century. Peons were kept against their will at a job by (often inflated) debts to their employers. Sometimes the employer would pay a fine to get a black person out of jail, on the condition that the convict work for him to pay off the debt. Other times immigrants were lured to the South (or to California, it seems) by promises of steady, well-paying employment, only to find that they incurred debts in their passage, accommodations, and supplies that they could never pay off. Most Southern states had laws that made it lawful to imprison and fine someone who broke their labor contract by fleeing, and since local law-enforcement often did the planters' bidding, they would simply turn over the captured laborers to their employers to do with them as they wished.

Peonage was little more than slavery; indeed, Pete Daniel argues, slavery set the stage for peonage: "An economy based on labor-intensive agriculture and extractive industries, a large African-American population, and a heritage of slavery, violence, and discrimination furnished a context for the continuation of slavery in another guise" (ix). They were, Daniel says, the poorest of the poor, existing "at the core of concentric circles of oppression, their entire world circumscribed by exploiters" (19).

The Shadow of Slavery draws primarily on Justice Department records of peonage complaints and prosecutions to paint a detailed portrait of southern involuntary servitude. Again and again, the institution survives public exposure by northern periodicals and legal attacks by U.S. attorneys and civil rights workers. Even the great flood of 1927, though exposing the system of radical inequality and oppression that dominated the Mississippi Delta, failed to raise enough public outcry over peonage to stop it. As late as the 1960s, peonage continued. Why? Acquiescent communities. Obsequious law-enforcement officials. Powerful planters. Powerless workers. Peonage survived in part because, Daniel writes, "The idea was unbearable and consequently unthinkable. Its stench of medieval bondage or Latin American oppression created security for it" (171). But it also survived because local custom allowed gross inequalities of power to persist.

Inequality this great--once indebted, poor blacks and immigrants had virtually no recourse, legal or otherwise--corrupts both the victims and victimizers. I don't believe in absolute equality for all people. Some people will be richer, some will be poorer. But a system like peonage takes advantage of the sinfulness of human hearts. When given the opportunity, people will exploit one another. It seems like our job--government and citizen alike--should be to make that a lot harder.

I wonder where the Christians were in this story. At one point, Daniel mentions a 1939 condemnation of peonage by the Georgia Baptists--was there more activity like this (181)? I fear the answer must be, not much, or there would have been a much bigger stink over the institution. As it was, peonage remained mostly invisible.

I also wonder if something like peonage continues to exist? Daniel makes the interesting observation that "Migrant workers . . . have replaced sharecroppers on the bottom rung of the southern agricultural ladder," citing a 1983 hearing before the U.S. House committee on Labor Standards that "produced vivid accounts of migrant abuses, including peonage" (xi).

A church with its imagination alive to the Old Testament ethical injunctions with regard to land and debt should not have ignored peonage systems. We should be advocates for debt-relief and (more) even distribution of resources.

Finally, a parting shot. This kind of evidence is why I cannot agree when someone says, "Slavery ended almost 150 years ago; we don't owe them [African-Americans] anything." The simple fact is that slavery did not end 150 years ago.

Matt Garcia, A World of Its Own: Race, Labor, and Citrus in the Making of Greater Los Angeles, 1900-1970, Studies in Rural Culture, ed. Jack Temple Kirby (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Matt Garcia engages a number of historiographies with this study: Chicano/a studies, labor history, (sub)urban history, agricultural/environmental history, and California history. And as he makes clear in his introduction, he means his work to be intensely theoretical. Following Robin D.G. Kelley's Race Rebels, Garcia wants to broaden the definition of politics to include domestic life and popular culture; although few of his characters engaged in labor strikes or overt political protests, he sees their actions--developing their separate colonias, going to dance halls, acting in plays, and writing newspapers--as inescapably political.

To make this argument, he draws on Antonio Gramsci's concept of "wars of position" to describe the resistance strategies of his Mexican and Mexican American workers. Rather than wage a "war of maneuver" on their employers/oppressors, workers in L.A.'s citrus belt attempted to build "counter-hegemonic alliances" with other oppressed groups. Chicana lemon packers, for example, could petition for better treatment or wages as women, workers, or Mexican-Americans (6).

Less central to his argument, but to my mind more interesting, he employs Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies to argue that landscapes are anything but neutral. Rather, "their form and process of creation often possess keys to understanding the type of social relations that exist within a given society" (4).

Garcia aims to do all this by telling "how the formation of the citrus empire and its attendant worker settlements laid the foundation for the expanded and segmented landscape known as 'Greater Los Angeles'" (5). Like others, he describes the Jeffersonian ideals of the citrus growers, observing their delight in creating a society that was both rural without being backward and urban without being congested. In this sense, he follows journalist and activist Carey McWilliams' work very closely (McWilliams quotes are the epigraphs for each chapter).

Though the story is familiar, Garcia's treatment is refreshingly detailed, especially in his narration of George Chaffey's Ontario settlement, a magnificent attempt to unite ten-acre family farms with the latest technology to build communities. In contrast to other agricultural industries in the midwest and elsewhere, which were being consolidated into larger and larger farms-and perhaps, too, in contrast to the pellagra-ridden, share-cropping South--the "citriscape" promised a civilized future for America. This vision often aligned with eugenicist views of the era. As one commentator put it, the most pressing problem of the time was "how to rearrange our social and economic system so that more of the superior member of our race will stay on the land" and reproduce (34).

This hope for civilization was, of course, undercut by citriculture's reliance on foreign (dirty!), cheap labor, who contrary to American rags-to-riches mythology, would never enjoy the "ideal country life" themselves. As Garcia rightly notes, very few agrarians of the time recognized that Jefferson's vision "promoted material equality and discouraged social stratification" (21). What happens, then, when living the agrarian ideal demanded that others remain as a permanent, nomadic, laboring class?

Actually, the life cycle of most citrus ranches meant that year-round labor was the rule. And so permanent settlements of Mexican American farmworkers developed throughout Southern California, some founded by citrus growers in an attempt to control and Americanize their employees, others springing up through the immigrant community's own efforts. The latter became the basis for Los Angeles' famously "polynucleated" landscape, a city of suburbs if there ever was one.

Garcia celebrates these semi-autonomous colonias (which often boasted their own churches, locally-owned stores, and mutual aid societies) as he celebrates Chicano handiwork throughout the book. The efforts of whites to "uplift" the foreign newcomers, on the other hand, he typically condemns as misguided at best, oppressive at worst. Imperfect as these efforts at intercultural understanding were, however, in the end Garcia holds them up as models for our disintegrating, identity-politics world.

For me, the takeaways of the book are two: first, that immigrant farm labor stories must be set carefully in their geographical contexts. Where are the immigrant communities located? How are they arranged differently than owner-sponsored housing? How do immigrants and laborers view the landscape differently than owners? Presumably they see fruit trees somewhat less romantically. But you should find out if you can.

Second, the immigrant labor force can be very differentiated and complex. In the citrus groves, there were Mexican Americans, braceros (contract workers), and undocumented workers; in the packinghouses, women labored under male supervisors. They did not necessarily share much beyond the shop floor.

Dori Sanders, Clover (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1990).

The owner of the oldest black-owned peach orchard in the South (the nation) is also a writer. Her books, Clover and Her Own Place draw on her agricultural vocation. In Clover, the peach orchard weaves in and out of the story.

Clover is the daughter of the newly married widower Gaten Hill. Hill dies in the beginning of the novel, leaving Clover alone with her new (white) stepmother Sara Kate, and her uncle Jim Ed and aunt Everleen. It is a story of coming to terms with death and abandonment, as well with the racial and cultural differences between her and Sara Kate. But Round Hill, SC is peach country, and the orchard business remains a backdrop throughout.

At her father's funeral, for example, Clover describes the strangeness she feels for her new stepmother and goes off on a tangent about farmworkers:

She's been my stepmother for almost four days now and all I know for sure about her is, she's not a Mexican. I can spot a Mexican a mile away. Every summer if there's a big peach crop the migrant workers flood Round Hill. We have peaches, but not enough to need Mexicans.
Chase Porter brings them in all the time. He couldn't get al those peaches picked without them. He's one of the biggest peach growers in South Carolina.

This Chase Porter and his relationship with Clover's family creates an intriguing window into the world of peach growers, large and small. He turns up later in the book as a suitor for Clover's white stepmother Sara Kate, and he has a reputation for great benevolence as the leading peach man in the area (even though Clover's uncle Jim Ed interprets his advances as pure greed. "A white man," he says, "never gets enough land or money" (137).

The Hills appear to get most of their money through their peach stand, and Clover spends most of her summer days there with her aunt and uncle, where all kinds of people stop for peaches.

Jim Ed is so worried about this peach crop I don't want to put another frown on his face. It wouldn't have any place to go, anyhow. His face is all filled up. A late spring freeze caused the peaches to have split-seeds. That means that once the seed of a peach freezes, the peach will split wide open as soon as it starts to get ripe. When customers complain about the way peaches look, Aunt Everleen will tell them right quick, "That's the Lord's work." It's a real slow day at the stand. Everleen jumps to her feet when a brand new pickup pulls up. "I see you have Elberta peaches on your sign," he says. "Yes, we do," Everleen brags. "It's the finest canning peach there is. Del Monte cans Elbertas. Says so right on the can." "Oh, I was wanting some to eat," the customer says. "It's the finest eating peach there is," Everleen put in quickly She rubs one on her big fluffy shirt, and takes a big bite. "This is truly the best peach I ever tasted." She stuffs the money he gives her into her pocket. He is a physicist down at the nuclear plant. I put his peck of peaches in his truck.

Clover is a very funny book, not least because of the culinary differences between Sara Kate and the Round Hill black community. Sara Kate cooks vegetables in water, without a speck of grease, and makes watery grits. She even puts jello on the turnip greens. After lunch one day, Clover narrates,

Sara Kate finally offers iced tea and cookies. I don't have to see them to know she will get those fancy paper doilies and those fancy, high-priced cookies that don't taste worth a dime. That woman can spend more in a grocery store than anybody I've ever seen in my life. And we still never have anything good to eat.

Leon Fink, The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

"To understand the motives and behavior of Third World Workers--either on their home turf or as immigrant recruits to more developed metropoles--we need to fit them into a global political economy of competitive markets, changing technology, and a managerial logic of labor control. Yet we must also recognize them as agents who continue to draw on local wisdom in advancing the interests of family, friendships, and community even in a faraway land." (5)

So in the case of the Morganton Maya, Aguacatecos and Chalchitecos found a new unity; immigrants thought of themselves nationally, linguistically, or by municipality, but also found themselves categorized as Hispanics, and so learned that identity. Meanwhile, Morganton changed in its religious institutions, educational and other social services, and in the kind of activism expected of workers. And the immigrants' home communities in Guatemala changed, too, becoming more Americanized, sometimes more prosperous, sometimes more corrupt socially.

This is an exhaustive (the number of interviews Fink conducted is dizzying) look at the growing phenomenon of the "nuevo new south" as it appeared in Morganton, North Carolina. And though Fink is primarily concerned with the ramifications for the labor movement, he is not blind to the importance of religion in the lives of his subjects, or to the culture of the South.

A result perhaps of my southern upbringing, the role of labor unions has been somewhat lost on me until recently (despite the fact that I somewhat reluctantly joined the Kroger union for part of a summer). So for me, the most interesting chapter was Chapter Six ("Changing Places") which describes the cultural adjustments of the immigrants and their senders. Some were "birds of passage" who identified almost entirely with their home country and planned to return there once they had enough money. Others (especially children) assimilated into the host culture. Others developed a kind of transnational identity, using the tools of the global economy to cultivate a pan-Mayan movement.
The intertwining themes of globalization and community receive their fullest treatment here.

In general I wanted to know more about the attitudes of local citizens, especially about the racial and cultural dynamics. What about the rednecks and African-Americans? What did they think about this union idea? Did they think the Guatemalans were especially equipped for unionization?

I also wanted to know more about immigrants attitudes to their physical environment: the land, the climate, the mountains, the agriculture. Did many of them try to plant gardens? Would they if given the opportunity?

The idea that the Guatemalan Maya reacted differently to poor working conditions of the global economy because of their communal, traditional wisdom, which had in turn been shaped by the global economy -- this is fascinating, and important. Understanding the home places of the new immigrant labor pool could help us engage it more thoughtfully.

During the Great Depression, thousands of Midwesterners fled the environmental and social degradation of the Dust Bowl for California. They hoped for a better living in the famously abundant Golden State, but California proved a bitter disappointment. The living and working conditions were miserable, and the migrants’ powerlessness before their agricultural employers made them vulnerable to exploitation and hunger. In the midst of this “Okie” influx, southern California’s citrus growers piled their unprofitable, superfluous fruit into great mountains, doused them with kerosene, and set them aflame. For these refugees, the destruction of food must have been a shock. (see Sackman 276-277).

At least it came as a shock to a group of middle class reformers. For John Steinbeck, Carey McWilliams, Dorothea Lange, Paul Taylor, and others, the “American exodus” of dust bowl migrants was deeply disturbing. In California’s labor camps, these reformers saw not only gut-wrenching deprivation but also the agrarian ideal of an independent yeomanry gone terribly awry. In contrast to Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican immigrants who had long toiled under similar conditions in California, the dust bowl migrants were mostly of European descent, the descendents of America’s great pioneers and the presumptive backbone of American democracy. Rather than finding a land amenable to self-sufficient family farming, the migrants seemed condemned to perpetual wage peonage.

This apparent subversion of the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal–small farms sustained by family labor—has occupied the attention of historians of California agriculture ever since. The journalist McWilliams called the state’s agricultural enterprises “Factories in the Field” in the 1930s, and more recent historians have either confirmed, complicated, or countered McWilliams’ characterization. Without exception, however, these historians have viewed the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries as the most crucial period of transformation in California—and, at least by implication, U.S. agriculture. The nation (and perhaps the world, too) is the inheritor of the social, environmental, economic and cultural trends worked out in California agriculture a hundred years ago.

“Where are the farmers?” This was

Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)

For too long, agricultural history has told the stories of commodity production alone. Scholarly treatments of the Columbian Exchange, meanwhile, have focused only on the organisms that traveled from place to place during the age of European exploration. According to Judith Carney, these are the blind spots that Black Rice aims to remedy. Carney’s story pairs consumption with production and knowledge systems with the seeds that crisscrossed the Atlantic.

Carney’s primary purpose may be “to place ingenuity in its proper setting”, to restore Africans to their rightful place in Atlantic history (8). And she spends a number of pages—perhaps too many, considering her emphasis on skills over seeds—carefully tracing the African origins of American rice. But one of her most significant innovations is her treatment of rice production as a knowledge system. Before the ascendance of mechanized crop production, Carney writes, “agriculture represented repositories of cultural knowledge built from generations of observation, trial, and error. Agriculture has long provided the tissue linking culture to environment, cultural identity to food” (136). The story of rice, then, must include not only its botanical heritage, not only cultivation techniques, but also how people processed and prepared it. For the Africans who carried rice cultivation to the Americas, rice was equally a crop and a food. Production and consumption were joined in a way that gave rice a long future as a staple. The West African cropping systems, to use modern parlance, were entirely sustainable.

Even given the possibility that Carney exaggerates the ecological appropriateness of African rice cultivation, it is hard to disagree with her argument that plantation economics profoundly disrupted this dynamic. This was especially the case in the processing rice, which in the colonial period had to be accomplished manually with mortar-and-pestle. The enormous scale of global consumption increased the demand for labor, transforming rice milling as “the echo of cultural identity” into “inhuman . . . labor”; mechanization of the process further eroded the cultural meaning that had been attached to processing rice (124). Commercial agriculture stretched the limits of both land and labor in the lowcountry, in part because an indigenous knowledge system for South Carolina rice was not allowed to develop gradually. The social and ecological limits went unrecognized.

I wonder if something similar may have happened in the peach industry. Peaches were not essential to the American diet, as rice was to Africans, but they played a role similar to that of apples described in Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire: hog fodder, brandy, and, occasionally, human food. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, increasing anxieties about the sustainability of cotton production and the example of the California fruit industry led more and more southern (particularly Georgia) farmers to try peaches. Increased railroad efficiency and the refrigerated railcar made northern markets more accessible, and peach production rose precipitously: from 2.7 million trees in 1890 to 12 million in 1910. Much of this increase, I suspect, comprised growers who were new to peaches and had not grown them for local consumption (some had never grown anything before). These growers got into the business for the promise of large profits. The knowledge system required to grow peaches successfully was not given time to evolve gradually.

The result, unsurprisingly, was boom and bust agriculture. Georgia growers overproduced, stretching the limits of the northern markets and making themselves vulnerable to problems like San Jose Scale, plum curculio, and brown rot. Production peaked in 1928 at 10 million bushels, declined, and finally settled into a more even pattern after World War II. The growers in the business today are mostly long-time family enterprises—the ones with the knowledge system to grow peaches reliably.

Reaction to Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002).

Larding the Lean Earth is a provocative work. In part this stems from Steven Stoll’s knack for turning a phrase. His descriptions of soil exemplify this sparkling prose. It is “the living tissue between economy and ecology,” he writes (13), and “the tablecloth under the banquet of civilization: no matter what people build on it, when it moves all the food and finery go crashing” (14). Stoll also takes seriously his role as educator, and the text is pocked with asides to the reader that make his intent clear. Nineteenth-century reformers “knew the stuff [dung] for what it was--” he writes in one example of this technique--“the partially digested wealth of their farms in a form that could be hauled to fields and made to turn another crop” (49). Stoll presents an historical “object lesson” (as he describes his account of South Carolina agriculture), in which he hopes to persuade us of a particular land ethic (121). This ideological commitment is even clearer in the epilogue, when he boldly declares that Amish farming is not anachronistic, but “the future of American agriculture” (216).

In this way, Larding parallels an older, more polemical work, The Unsettling of America, in which Wendell Berry famously laid out his case for the two tendencies in American culture: one rootless, rapacious, always looking for the next field or community to despoil, the other fixed and attentive to developing an intimate, sustainable relationship with the land. Stoll’s work, indeed, can be thought of as a more historically precise case study of Berry’s broader thesis. Perhaps better put, Stoll is drawing from the same deep well of cultural meaning that Berry used to such dramatic effect.

One wonders whether this ideological commitment leads Stoll to exaggerate the importance of improvement and of particular people within the movement. He acknowledges, of course, that the improvers were reaching at best 20 percent of Atlantic Coast farmers. A character like John Lorain, about whom even Stoll knows very little, becomes a heroic combination of democratic sentiment and sustainable agriculture in this story. On the other hand, this forthrightness is refreshing. The reader knows where Stoll stands, and it is in the dung-laced idyll of the ecologically sensitive Amish farmer, not in the cattle factories of industrial agriculture whose stench assaults him “like a wave of heat” (9). Described as it is in Larding, it is hard to disagree with his positive assessment of closed-system agriculture.

Read closely, however, Stoll’s story is infused with more ambivalence than one might expect from the prologue and epilogue. With the possible exception of Lorain, the improvers worked not only for agricultural sustainability but also their own class interests. Their system was not friendly to upward mobility. In order to be practiced on a large scale, it would have required maintaining a sizeable pool of landless labor, enough to cart around three thousand pounds of dung every three days. And as the example of South Carolina demonstrates, the system worked only under certain environmental conditions. Where pasture grasses failed to flourish, so too did convertible husbandry.

Stoll’s greatest success with this book is suggested by his opening conceit: that “what comes out of the other end of a cow opens a dynamic view to the environment” and society (9). This retelling of the antebellum clamor over migration, I think, provides an excellent introduction to what environmental (or agro-ecological) history offers to traditional historical narratives. While undergraduates might get lost somewhat in the numerous improvers, the story itself transfers well to lecture format. It brings home a sense of twenty-first-century loss: abandoned knowledge of soil, dung, plants, animals, and working (as opposed to recreational) relationships with the land.

David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

Perhaps more than any other state, California is indelibly associated with what has been called “agribusiness” or “industrial agriculture.” The state’s specialty crops, propelled by powerful marketing organizations, have in many cases established such dominance that growers in other states have resigned themselves to local and niche markets. Georgia peach growers, for example, were national leaders at the start of the twentieth century, but are increasingly turning to local retail and mail-order gift baskets in order to boost revenue.

California’s dominance has had a seamy underbelly, however, one well documented by journalists, labor historians, and others horrified at the working conditions of California’s migrant laborers. Carey McWilliams’ 1939 Factories in the Field set the tone of righteous indignation for this brand of polemical history, a pattern that, according to historian David Vaught, has gone unquestioned for some 60 years.

In Cultivating California, Vaught asks if we even know what “industrial agriculture” means. By examining California specialty-crop growers “in the full context of their culture” (3), Vaught aims to carve out a kind of middle ground, demonstrating that some growers understood themselves neither as simple family farmers, nor as industrialist agribusinessmen, but as horticulturalists. These men were committed to “small, virtuous communities and economic development” (10). Cultivating California is a history of labor relations, but Vaught insists that such relationships be “analyzed in their agricultural context” (9). Fresno raisin-growers and Davisville almond-growers had different labor problems and proposed different labor solutions, differences that had a lot to do with their horticultural ideals.

To make his argument, Vaught follows four specialty-crop communities—Fresno raisins, Davisville almonds, Newcastle deciduous fruit, and Wheatland hops—chronologically through four periods of development. The first period, comprising the first two chapters, chronicles the crops’ commercial emergence from about 1875 to 1900. The horticultural settlement of each region except for Wheatland was accompanied by high rhetoric about the “pleasant and profitable” (44) way of life horticulture represented, as well as deeply frustrating experiences in managing labor. Chapter Three explores this continuing contradiction from 1900 to 1910, as growers adopted more progressive marketing techniques but remained dependent on the labor of Chinese and Japanese immigrants. The third period (Chapter Four) takes us up to World War I, introducing the Progressive state as a major influence in agricultural labor relations. Here Vaught reminds us that, unlike many farmers, California’s horticulturalists were anti-statist, resenting the intrusion of agricultural professionals into what they regarded as their areas of expertise. In Chapter Five, Vaught explains how this conservatism was transformed by the patriotic fervor and labor shortages engendered by World War I: “Without a pang of conscience,” he concludes, “growers now turned to translocal institutions and organizations, including the state, to control their ‘bugbear’ of labor” (186).

A couple of limitations detract somewhat from the book’s argument. First, a broader context could underscore the significance of these California specialty crop growers. It would be particularly interesting to trace the connections between the rhetoric of California growers and eastern contemporaries like Liberty Hyde Bailey and predecessors like A.J. Downing. What is the genealogy of the horticultural ideal that is so central to Vaught’s argument? Second, the organizational and governmental chaos of California’s Progressive era, which makes up so much of Chapters Four and Five, can bewilder at times. A more forceful articulation of what his study contributes to our understanding of “the roots of the states’ farm labor relations” (2) could have alleviated the confusion somewhat. Beyond a more complete picture of growers themselves, how does Vaught hope clarify the history of labor relations? Presumably, it is in tracing the transformation of specialty-crop growers from anti-statist yeomen to government-dependent labor lords with a powerful legislative lobby (Chapter Five), but this is never spelled out.

Still, Cultivating California succeeds admirably in setting apart California’s horticulturalists from other farmers and, more generally, emphasizing the diversity of California agriculture. He does this primarily by including the story of hop production in Wheatland, a choice that seems odd at first since hops were different in almost every way from California’s other specialty crops. But Vaught must refute McWilliams, who relied on the story of a 1913 labor riot on a Wheatland hop farm to argue that the farm worker unrest of the 1930s extended back into the nineteenth century. Hop producers are foils for Vaught’s real subjects, the growers of fruits and nuts. And despite the continued labor problems of the last sixty years, Vaught maintains a remarkably sympathetic posture toward these growers for whom the “moral responsibility” to farm still looms as large as the profit motive (191).

Review Essay of:

Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)

David Vaught, Cultivating California: Growers, Specialty Crops, and Labor, 1875-1920 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

Contradictions make good material for history books. Find a group of people experiencing a conflict between two sets of ideals or a collision between their noble intentions and the reality they face, and you have the potential for a good story. These kinds of quandaries may crop up somewhat less commonly as the subjects of popular histories, but academics are beholden to complexity. Like cattle with their egrets, historical traditions are symbiotically accompanied by scholarship that “problematizes” and debunks, frequently by locating contradictions.

Two relatively recent works exemplify this relationship of revision. Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible is a sweeping synthesis of two historical interpretations—America as beacon of democracy and equal opportunity, and America as racial imperialist—and combines them into one quandary-infused narrative. Theodore Roosevelt was just the first of many twentieth-century U.S. leaders who struggled to reconcile what Gerstle terms “civic nationalism” with “racial nationalism.” From the Spanish-American War to the Cold War, Gerstle argues that “these two powerful and contradictory ideals” have decisively shaped U.S. history. Gerstle skillfully keeps the contradiction in play throughout the text, neither condemning nor praising the United States. This attention to complexity is one reason why reviewers have called his work “insightful and nuanced” and “deeply textured.”

David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tightly focused history of labor relations in California specialty-crop agriculture from 1875 to 1920, is different in almost every way from American Crucible. But Vaught’s raisin, almond, and fruit growers faced a contradiction not unlike that of Theodore Roosevelt and his ideological descendents: they sought a dignified, independent, community-oriented life and business, while depending upon the exploitation of cheap immigrant labor.

In what follows, I consider each work in turn, highlighting its major themes, evaluating its argument, and delineating what I take to be its most important contributions. Without attempting to pronounce a winner, since the books are competing in altogether different races, I will argue that in its narrow scope, mundane subject matter, and attention to detail, Vaught’s study provides a helpful perspective on Gerstle’s argument. While Gerstle soars over the American political and cultural landscape, Vaught digs into the agricultural and economic specifics, providing a view of Gerstle’s synthesis from the ground.

Cindy Hahamovitch, The Fruits of Their Labor: Atlantic Coast Farmworkers and the Making of Migrant Poverty, 1870-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

Cindy Hahamovitch’s moral clarity is refreshing. Without pausing to apologize or equivocate, The Fruits of Their Labor exposes the greed, oppression, conflict, and courage that characterized the world of migrant farmworkers along the Atlantic coast from Reconstruction to World War II. Thoroughly engaged in the story—Hahamovitch’s narrative clips along nicely—I was amazed that it had not been told before. If her hope is to convince that the plight of the migrant farm worker was, as she puts it, “a product of a specific and alterable relationship between farmworkers, farmers, and the state,” then she has succeeded (13). I am convinced.

In spite of the depressing plotline, her story is actually quite hopeful—the relationship is “alterable.” In this way The Fruits of Their Labor contrasts strikingly with David Vaught’s Cultivating California, a tale of California specialty crop labor relations from the angst-ridden perspective of the growers. In Vaught’s telling, the growers were much more complex characters, men of ideals, culture, and community who struggled to reconcile their bucolic vision with their need for cheap, seasonal, labor. (Perhaps this difference is due to the different geographic settings, but I think it has more to do with the authors’ predilections.) The reader is left with more sympathy for the growers, but also more pessimism that anything could have been done to right the situation.

Still, Hahamovitch’s explanations are simplistic at times. Her argument that the “experience of becoming employers, more than changes in methods, markets, and crops . . . made a business of farming,” is intriguing, but she fails to give us a sense of this transformation from farmers to businessmen (36). I suspect that it was more complicated than she makes it out to be. Frank Whitehurst alone of all the farmers in the book comes out as a reasonable man, although she concedes that “to make him out to be the only reasonable farmer along the East Coast is unfair” (164). If this is true, his uniqueness in Hahamovitch’s account is striking.

Workers, too, sometimes seem one-dimensional at times. When comparing New Jersey’s reliance on black southern labor in the 1890s and the 1930s, she makes little of the fact that the black southerners were coming from different parts of the South (upper South in the 1890s, cotton belt in the 1930s), and that their different characteristics may have contributed to their different reception in New Jersey. It is only the New Jersey farmers that have changed, taking up “the litany of the New South as their own”—meaning that they now blame blacks for their labor problems (135). (She also does not explain what exactly this has to do with the New South—but perhaps this just reflects my own ignorance.)

Hahamovitch starts off describing farmworkers as “movers, strivers, and self-exploiters” (36). While she demonstrates decisively the first two designations, the last is only implied. Presumably she is referring to the (reluctant) willingness of farmworkers to work for unreasonably low wages and their failure to organize effectively, but she leaves me curious as to what farmworkers contributed to their own exploitation.

JOSIAH: READ CRONON'S BOOK. THANK YOU.

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).

Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

Nineteen ninety-one was a good year for American history. William Cronon and Richard White—both immensely influential in several fields—each published some of their most enduring work. Richard White’s remarkable effort to synthesize the New Western History, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”, is a landmark in that field. (His Middle Ground, meanwhile, is the same for Native American history.) And William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis is important for urban, economic, Western and environmental historians alike.

It may seem odd to review the two together. Nature’s Metropolis is about Chicago and what is today considered the Midwest; Chicago actually lies outside the bounds of White’s West and does not even appear in the index. Cronon’s work is geographically narrow and contains original research; White’s encompasses the entire West and is almost wholly synthetic. Cronon’s apples do not look much like White’s oranges.

And yet the books also overlap and complement each other. Both impart a strong sense of change over time and of the importance of relationships within and between economies and people groups. They share an appreciation for the ecological limits and costs of market-based production. White fleshes out and corroborates Cronon’s story of city-based westward expansion, while Cronon nods to the federally-subsidized cowboy that is so important to White’s argument. As it turns out, even apples and oranges may be productively compared.

Jordan, Winthrop D. The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. New York. Oxford University Press, 1974.

Race is a mystifying thing. It appears on the surface to be a simple fact of life—skin coloring is, after all, readily apparent—but examine it a little more closely, and clarity rapidly gives way to confusion. What is the dividing line between white and black? If we can determine no precise measure, is it really a physical fact? Perhaps racial differences are more a matter of culture than physiology. If so, the waters are murkier still, for cultures are even more difficult to describe than physical features. The history of racialized slavery and segregation in the U.S. only deepens the mystery. Why white over black?

This is the burden Winthrop Jordan’s work on the historical origins of racism. His history denaturalizes something we consider to be a fact of life. And, as has become popular to point out, something that was historically constructed can also be deconstructed. Mental habits can be changed.

Jordan is principally concerned, then, with racism as complex of “attitudes,” lying somewhere “between ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’, between conscious and unconscious mental processes” (ix). His sources, as a result, tend to be more qualitative than quantitative. Letters and journals of planters and clergymen appear frequently, as do legislative documents toward the end of the book. But he supports his argument primarily with published works, from Shakespeare (most notably, Othello) to quasi-scientific explanations for physical differences (most extensively, Thomas Jefferson).

The White Man’s Burden is a “drastic abridgement” of Jordan’s opus, White Over Black; as a result of this compression and some very skillful rewriting, the book clips along at an astonishing pace (viii). In fifty pages Jordan takes us from first contact around 1550 to the establishment of North American slavery by 1700; in seventy more up to the American Revolution; in a hundred more to the end of his story in the early 1800s.

At the core of Jordan’s argument is racism as a sort of Jekyl and Hyde phenomenon, a psychological projection of white men’s anxieties onto blacks. “White men,” he writes “were attempting to destroy the living image of primitive aggressions which they said was the Negro but was really their own” (222). To cite perhaps the clearest example, Jordan contends that whites portrayed both male and female Negroes as libidinous creatures that required strict discipline because white men were unable to own up to their sexual passions. Here also is the hopeful side of Jordan’s grim tale: “if the white man turned to stare at the animal within him, if he once admitted unashamedly that the beast was there, he might see that the old foe was a friend as well” (226).

White men, of course, bear primary responsibility for this destructive set of attitudes. But Jordan also describes a whole series of tragic historical circumstances that played into the development of racial prejudice. When the English came upon Africans for the first time, their society was “in a state of rapid flux.” Their religion was becoming more inward and self-scrutinizing; their entrepreneurs were self-consciously “on the make.” The Africans were different. “From the first,” then, “Englishmen tended to set Africans over against themselves” as part of constructing their own identity (25). Through a similar combination of conscious and unconscious steps—their concept of slavery, the Spanish example, the necessities of the New World—English colonists came to accept the association of Africans with slavery. By the eighteenth century, the rapid influx of Africans induced a “thoroughgoing commitment” to slavery on the part of the British colonists, a “submission to the decrees of life in America” (57).

But this commitment to slavery coexisted with an equally strong belief in equality and natural rights—the principles that led to the American Revolution. The colonists dealt with this contradiction by continuing to emphasize the differences between themselves and Africans: they outlawed interracial sex, resisted the evangelization of slaves, and ascribed to various theories of Negro inferiority. “Slavery could survive,” after all, “only if the Negro were a man set apart” (89).

Still, in the Revolution and its aftermath, Americans became increasingly self-conscious about the contradiction between slavery and freedom. The anti-slavery movement gained traction, although only enough to end the slave trade at a time when it was becoming economically unviable anyway. The Haitian Revolution—the world’s only successful slave uprising—on the other hand, made slavery “entirely unsuitable for frank discussion,” which led in turn to a hardening of the racial landscape in America (148). “Many Americans,” Jordan concludes, “seemed unable to tolerate equality without separation” (161). This painful incongruity would find its ultimate expression in Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s writings represented “the most intense, extensive, and extreme formulation of anti-Negro ‘thought’” of his time, yet his racism was joined by “his prejudice for freedom and his larger egalitarian faith” (193). The latter tendency, Jordan suggests, would eventually prevail in America.

Jordan’s work has much to recommend it. Although this abridged version contains no notes, it is clear that he has mined some of the best available materials to support his argument. Strangely enough, at the center of The White Man’s Burden is an assertion that cannot be proven. The reader must accept Jordan’s psychoanalysis of white men in order to fully approve his argument that they dealt with their inner turmoil by projecting it onto Africans. The credibility of his contention, then, rests on beliefs about the nature of humans. Yet this explanation, as esoteric as it may seem, is remarkably resonant. For unlike interpretations that posit racism as little more than a justification for social or economic advantage, Jordan’s allows for inconsistency. People can be racist and yet remain human. This simple insight may be Jordan’s chief contribution.

Final assignment for the Latin American Colloquium . . . I don't think this is a very good historiographical essay -- too diffuse -- but here it is anyway.

The different sugar-producing machines, installed here and there through the centuries, can be seen also as a huge machine of machines in a state of continuous technological transformation . . . ever since it was put into play, this powerful machine has attempted systematically to shape, to suit to its own convenience, the political, economic, social, and cultural spheres of the country that nourishes it until that country is changed into a sugar island.

The presence of the sugar plantation in Caribbean history is so pervasive that Cuban author Antonio Benítez-Rojo resorts to metaphor and anthropomorphism to describe it. Far from being just another form of agricultural production, Benítez-Rojo’s plantation is a thing in itself, with almost-human volition. This plantation has shaped the Caribbean for four hundred year, fashioning “sugar islands” one after the other. No matter that “sugar’s hegemony begins in Barbados, passes to Saint-Domingue, and ends in Cuba”; no matter “the challenge of slavery’s abolition, or the arrival of independence, or the adoption of a socialist mode of production.” The plantation proliferates.

Jose C. Moya, Cousins and Strangers: Spanish Immigrants in Buenos Aires, 1850-1930 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998)

Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002)

Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2005), 263.

Jose C. Moya’s Cousins and Strangers is a remarkable effort. It is, as Nora Faires writes, really “three notable works: a detailed, probing social history . . . a shorter, provocative foray into the theoretical thicket . . . and a historiographical tour de force.” Moya’s “foray” into the question of individual agency is particularly provocative, comparing fruitfully with recent works by Rebecca Scott and Lara Putnam.

Moya rejects the premise that immigrants were “helpless pawns” moved about by “deterministic forces.” But as his research developed, his central concern shifted: “I became less interested in stressing the immigrants’ role as volitional actors in the drama,” he writes, “and more intrigued by how structural parameters limited and shaped that volition.” He discovers that while individuals had their personal reasons for going, other factors led them to move when they did: the European population explosion, the mechanization of agriculture, and the rise of political liberalism, among others. Moya is not impressed by the role of government in this wave of migration, which, aside from keeping the borders open, “proved to be superstructural and even superfluous.”

Making the Sources Speak: Ulrich, Taylor, and Heyrman on the Early Republic

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1991)

Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)

Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)

Great historians have a knack for seeing the potential in primary sources. Forgotten archives, mundane diaries, unnoticed correspondence – these become treasure troves in the hands of imaginative scholars. For the historian must also bring the source to life, analyzing, interpreting, paraphrasing in such a way as to engage attention and sustain the argument.

Three historians – Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Alan Taylor, and Christine Leigh Heyrman – have accomplished this difficult task with remarkable dexterity, and a careful examination of their work yields important points of comparison. Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale is the story of one document, one person, in one small New England town. Taylor’s William Cooper’s Town is broader in scope, relating the rise and fall of one man and in the process telling the story of the early frontier and New York politics. Wider-ranging still is Heyrman’s Southern Cross, a grand tale of evangelicalism’s cultural adaptation and consequent ascendancy across “the South.” The differing subject matter, the authors’ individual styles, and the nature of the sources themselves all affect the techniques they use to make their sources speak. In the end, it is a question of how well the authors demonstrate their authority. Whom do we believe? and why?

Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002).

The Company They Kept is another of the apparently untold stories of Latin American and Caribbean history. We have heard the tale of banana companies’ ruthless exploitation of land, laborers, and governments in Latin America, as well as the mostly vain attempts of laborers and governments to resist, but the full story of the migrant population that supplied labor to Latin America’s various nineteenth- and twentieth-century export booms has been neglected. This is especially true of the women who worked in petty retail, domestic service, or prostitution. Putnam partially rectifies that neglect by telling the stories of Port Limón, Costa Rica, from 1870-1960. The stories can be disorienting if one lacks a firm grasp of the political and economic historiography that preceded Putnam’s effort, but they are nonetheless illuminating.

Along the way Putnam provides one of the clearest statements about the categories of race and gender I have yet seen: “Race and gender are both culturally constructed hierarchies that justify the unequal distribution of material power with reference to supposed biological difference.” She is careful to point out, however that race and gender “are very different kinds of things. . . . Race can be constructed at a distance; gender is created up close and personal” (16).

The distinction is helpful because race, gender, and class are sometimes treated as if they were modular, as if the oppression of colored people, female people, and poor people were of a piece. Much of the argument for the legitimacy of gender as a category of analysis, in fact, seems to be based on the widespread acceptance of race as a category of analysis. If race and gender are equally culturally constructed, the logic goes, then they are equally susceptible to being dismantled.

But as Putnam demonstrates in her reconstruction of family and community networks among migrants in Costa Rica, race and gender show up in very different ways. Whereas oppression of chinos in Costa Rica was predicated on hatred and disgust for the entire race, inequality between men and women before the law was predicated not on misogyny but on the idea that women would have access to justice through their husbands or fathers. Perhaps Limón’s unusual regard for women’s rights (as seen in the ability of prostitutes to sue for defamation or loss of property) was partially due to the awareness that migrant men were unusually unreliable in caring for their spouses.

Underlying the use of race, gender, and class as categories of analysis seems to be an assumption that inequality is the fundamental evil of human relations; underlying that assumption seems to be a definition of inequality that is tied very closely to the putative rights of individuals. Racial and gendered oppression are seen as two faces of one problem partially because people are seen as atomistic isolates. But exclusion of an ethnic group is different than exclusion of one gender precisely because while men and women cannot be separated from the families and communities that tie them together, ethnic groups are separated from each other by the creation of segregated family and community structures.

“History is about oppression,” a U.S. historian explained to our class of first year graduate students, indicating what has become the historian’s trinity of race, gender, and class. This obsession, he said, may be “incredibly limiting”, but since the historians’ project involves the dismantling of patriarchy, white supremacy, and exploitive capitalism, it is also “incredibly necessary”. History is a strident chorus, forcefully reminding readers of past (and present) injustices.

Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

“What stories did they tell themselves,” Laura Briggs asks of U.S. policymakers, “that enabled them to see their collusion in the economic brutalization and increasing malnutrition of working-class people in Puerto Rico . . . as ‘doing good’ (58)?” Reproducing Empire has many projects in mind: to explain globalization in terms of colonialism and development, to include the U.S. as a full participant in colonialism. The project suggested by this quote, however, is central. Ostensibly, Briggs is talking about the cultural issues – gender, sexuality, science, race, family – that have defined the relationship between the U.S. and Puerto Rico. But the almost unspoken story behind the story she tells is a Marxian tale of the expropriation of land, the creation of the proletariat, and the production of bourgeois myths. We learn that U.S. helped create a working class by dispossessing the Puerto Rican peasantry and developing the island’s industries, and then used the sexuality of Puerto Rican women – prostitution policy, birth control initiatives, and finally sociological and anthropological renderings of the “culture of poverty” – to remain in power. It is this latter tool of domination that Briggs brings to light in the book; she means to show that “representations of working-class Puerto Rican women have never been innocent” (203).

And so, to North Americans who are concerned with Puerto Rican women, she says, “A plague o’ both your houses.” Puerto Rico does not need your vilification of patronization. Whether they saw Puerto Rican women as dangerous prostitutes (conservatives) or as mistreated “welfare queens” (liberals), both groups have denied that the U.S. had much to do with Puerto Rico’s troubles to begin with, and both have extended U.S. domination over the island and its residents.

The only heroes in the story are Puerto Ricans who saw through the veil of hegemonic language: groups who held that poverty was created by outside forces, by racism and discrimination, by colonialism – not by the Puerto Rican family. Thus, as Briggs tells us in the final chapter, the book “represents a genealogy of the demonization of poor women in the welfare reform debates of 1994-97” – a debate profoundly informed by the “culture of poverty” thesis of the controversial Moynihan Report and Oscar Lewis’ La Vida (192).

Briggs’ study is in many ways a theoretical tour de force, as the epilogue makes clear. The underlying assumption, however, is the centrality of power. Who has it, who doesn’t, and why? In her story, U.S. people maintain their power over Puerto Rican people (sometimes inadvertently, as with mainland feminists in the 1970s) through studies and policies that address reproduction. Science and government are weapons of class warfare.

Briggs seems to be profoundly disillusioned with the intellectual effort to extend help to the oppressed. All our “sources of optimism – Marxism, feminism, nationalism, and science” – have been found “wanting” (209). Does Briggs have an alternative positive project in mind?

I read the book last night and wrote the review this morning, so I don't think I captured it very well. Here it is anyway... She's a good writer and an assiduous researcher, but according to our instructor, a terrible driver.

Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).

Once, there were two worlds of sugarcane. Both were shaped by the harsh, precise demands of the crop and its volatile international market. Both depended on African slave labor. Both experienced the turmoil of wars for independence and the demands of former slaves for equal rights. Both harbored white supremacists. Yet only one drew a color line across the political landscape. Why?

Separated only by the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana and Cuba in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared economic and social realities, but the political solutions they came to – in particular their definitions of citizenship – were nearly opposite. Louisiana’s white supremacists locked in their political power for over fifty years, stripping blacks of the voting rights they had momentarily enjoyed under Reconstruction with tortured legal formulations like the infamous grandfather clause. In Cuba, U.S. officials imposed similar restrictions on the franchise initially, but Cubans of all races rejected what they saw as the legacy of colonialism and instituted universal manhood suffrage instead.

Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Few (if any) historical monographs will admit to telling only the stories of the “big men.” No one tells us in an introduction that they will be concerned with the centers of power, because frankly, the oppressed and marginalized people don’t really play a part in this story. On the contrary, the trend is toward the history of the heretofore ignored, because despite their reputation for powerlessness and inertness, they are actually potent historical actors. They have “agency”!

“Really. A history of peach horticulture?” My friend looks at me, too kind to ask the question behind the question: who cares? Nodding sheepishly, I picture myself the world’s expert on something that concerns approximately seventeen other people. And again the gulf between professional history and the general public widens.

But the reality is sometimes quite the opposite, as Ramón Gutiérrez discovered when he published When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away. First released in 1991, the book won enthusiastic recognition from the historical profession, winning eight awards in the next two years. In 1993, however, When Jesus Came faced a storm of criticism, particularly among Pueblo Indians. Gutiérrez found himself defending his work to academics and non-academics who not only disapproved of his methods, but were also personally offended by his conclusions.

For her 1999 book From Subjects to Citizens, Sarah Chambers put her ear to the street to hear the voices of the popular classes of Arequipa, Peru from 1780 to 1854. Primarily using court documents from personal injury and libel cases, Chambers conjures up a world full of colorful characters and surprising interactions. The result is a little like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ magical realism without the magic, like a People’s Court anthology without the coaching. The scenes are no less dramatic. For example, “Severiche brought charges against Pozo for slapping him, chasing him with a sword, and insulting his daughter.” In 1815, “when Micaela Begaso went to rebuke her husband’s alleged lover, María ‘So-and-So,’ the young woman’s family attacked her ‘with sticks, a knife, scissors, and stones.’”

Of course, the book is much more than entertaining vignettes from Peruvian archives. In showing how the popular classes represented themselves in the courtrooms of Arequipa, Chambers hopes to explain how upper-class caudillos could have won the support of people who, at first glance, had little in common with them. In other words, how did the regional leaders maintain hegemony over a diverse population?

According to Chambers, the answer is in a common definition of “honor” in the new republic, a definition that bore the imprint of the people’s voices. In Arequipa, already a city of ethnic and class “ambiguities,” ordinary people like artisans, farmers, merchants increasingly claimed rights as “hombres de bien” (honorable men). Supporting their defenses by pointing to their hard work and patriarchal management of their households, they subtly shifted the basis of honor from status to virtue – honor was no longer a function of noble birth. In republican Peru, anyone who lived up to certain standards could claim the rights of honorable citizens. Women were excluded from this definition, however: their good citizenship was relegated to the home.

Peru’s independence from Spain in 1825 did not immediately provide more freedom for Peruvians. Quite the contrary, republican officials cracked down on “immoral” activities like gambling, drinking, and loafing, which, they were convinced, led to crime. In response, Arequipeños defended their rights as citizens according to the new constitution and the changing definition of honor. Soon this language of honor that developed among the popular classes found its way into the mouths of national politicians. Those who emerged from Arequipa in the mid-nineteenth century defended the honor and rights of all honest working men, winning large scale popular support, if at the expense of women.

While the restrictions placed on women are undeniable, it is not clear that this process was intentionally hegemonic. Did elite and lower class men conspire to exclude women in order to shore up their own power? Perhaps Arequipa’s women were as committed to the patriarchal order as the men. Either way, I am a little uncomfortable with the so-called hegemonic processes. Like many others who uses this term, I have not yet read the book.

Still, the strengths of From Subjects to Citizens far outweigh this weakness. As an unassuming look “beyond the narrow sphere of formal politics,” Chambers succeeds in showing how, in this small corner of Latin America, the daily lives of ordinary people affected formal politics. Combining humility with careful research, Chambers avoids the temptation of making her study seem grander than it is, and quietly convinces.

NOTES
Sarah C. Chambers, From Subject to Citizen: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa Peru 1780-1854 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 171.
Archivo Regional de Arequipa, Intendencia Causas Criminales (9-XII-1815), “Doña Micaela Begaso contra María de tal por injuries,” in Chambers, 108.
Chambers, 90.

The world of colonialism, slavery, and race in the 18th and 19th centuries can be almost monolithic in popular U.S. understandings. Whites of European descent enslaved black Africans, who were then put to work on plantations that profited whites and the imperial powers who sent them. When emancipation was discussed, it was an ideal of a fringe group of white abolitionists, who despite their modern ideas were too few to effect change in many places. Beginning with the abolition of the English slave trade in 1807 and ending with the emancipation of U.S. slaves in 1863, Africans were finally granted freedom by people of European descent.

The Haitian Revolution explodes every one of these assumptions. Starting with the first successful slave revolt in 1791 and concluding with the creation of the first independent black ''republic'' in 1804, this revolution featured former slaves and descendents of slaves wresting power from Europeans on their own. It is a natural choice for studying the agency of marginalized people, which has become a kind of Holy Grail for historians in recent years.
Highlighting the agency of the Haitian revolutionaries does not require a particularly flexible imagination, however, as Laurent Dubois demonstrates in his Avengers of the New World. Dubois' work not only retells the story of the Haitian Revolution, it also argues for the Revolution's central place in the history of slavery's destruction and democracy's rise. ''If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too.'' In contrast to past historians of the Revolution, Dubois emphasizes the agency of the insurrectionists by reading ''against the grain'' of texts authored mostly by whites: throughout the book he suggests interpretations of events that attribute wisdom and logic to participants of African descent. Dubois also takes an explicitly transnational approach to the story, showing the interrelationships of Haiti, France, African kingdoms, Caribbean colonies, and other European nations. And although he does not omit the role of violence in the Revolution, he points out that it was used by all sides in the conflicts that composed it.

Aside from these differences in emphasis, Dubois' project seems to be straightforward: tell the story. Although the Revolution has enjoyed considerable attention within Haiti, it has not been emphasized in broader Atlantic or American histories. Dubois seems to be aiming primarily for this broader audience, in hopes of writing Haiti's story into the popular understanding of slavery and freedom in the Americas. He is well-equipped for this task: his prose is measured and finely-tuned, and he successfully weaves older accounts of the Revolution with newer research to create a narrative that is comprehensive but not unwieldy.

His account raises some questions that suggest further exploration, however. He notes, for example, that while many slaves destroyed the plantations and all the accompanying machinery, others took over the plantation to run it for themselves. Was the destruction of plantation paraphernalia a symbolic act, and did most slaves grasp the economic power the plantations represented? Those slaves who wanted to set up on their own by cultivating gardens: what were their reasons? Even if their motivations prove impossible to discern, what patterns of settlement ensued? Perhaps Dubois tells us all there is to know when he describes former slaves cultivating small plots for their families and local markets, but the possibility of more information about this expression of “independence and subsistence” is tantalizing, as is the suggestion of a Haitian agrarian yeomanry that was crushed by Toussaint Louverture’s policies.

I am reminded of an old Stephen Hahn article about land-usage laws promulgated in the wake of Reconstruction, by which plantation-owners restricted black freedom and preserved for themselves a dependent workforce. Hahn claims that whites were partially motivated by a desire to prevent what had happened in the Caribbean societies: “the success of ex-slaves in taking up former provision grounds that proved unsuited to staple crops.” It seems to me that a profitable transnational comparison could be in order.

Notes
Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.
Ibid., 230, 239-240.
Stephen Hahn, “Hunting, Fishing, and Foraging: Common Rights and Class Relations in the Postbellum South” (Radical History Review 26, 1982), 44.