Slavery and the Enlightenment in the British Atlantic, 1750–1807

This book focuses on how Enlightenment ideas shaped plantation management and slave work routines.

Justin Roberts (Author)

9781107680753, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 April 2018

366 pages, 31 b/w illus. 27 tables
23 x 15.3 x 2.4 cm, 0.6 kg

'There is a great deal that is impressive and worthwhile about this study. The book is based on a wide body of scholarship on labor, political economy, archaeology, and other fields … for scholars and students interested in slave labor in the New World and the Caribbean and North America in particular, this is a valuable text.' Frederick Knight, Agricultural History

This book examines the daily details of slave work routines and plantation agriculture in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, focusing on case studies of large plantations in Barbados, Jamaica and Virginia. Work was the most important factor in the slaves' experience of the institution. Slaves' day-to-day work routines were shaped by plantation management strategies that drew on broader pan-Atlantic intellectual and cultural principles. Although scholars often associate the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment with the rise of notions of liberty and human rights and the dismantling of slavery, this book explores the dark side of the Enlightenment for plantation slaves. Many planters increased their slaves' workloads and employed supervisory technologies to increase labor discipline in ways that were consistent with the process of industrialization in Europe. British planters offered alternative visions of progress by embracing restrictions on freedom and seeing increasing labor discipline as central to the project of moral and economic improvement.

Introduction
1. Clock work: time, quantification, amelioration, and the Enlightenment
2. Sunup to sundown: agricultural diversity and seasonal patterns of work
3. Lockstep and line: gang work and the division of labor
4. Negotiating sickness: health, work, and seasonality
5. Labor and industry: skilled and unskilled work
6. Working lives: occupations and families in the slave community
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Economic history [KCZ], Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], Regional & national history [HBJ]