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Indiana University

From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves

From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves

The Dynamics of Labour Bargaining in the Americas
Edited by Mary Turner
Distribution: Sales territory is limited to the U.S., Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Canada, and Mexico
Publication date: 10/1/1995
Format: paper 0 pages, 7 illus.
6.125 x 9.25
ISBN: 978-0-253-21001-2
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Description

“. . . a very welcome addition to the literature on labour history.” —Labour History Review

“This is a valuable collection of essays which gives fresh perspectives and interesting empirical data on the modes of labor bargaining by New World slaves and on the transition from ‘chattel’ to ‘wage’ slavery.” —New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West-Indische Gids

“Of uniformly high quality, these essays underline the fluidity and dynamic of bargaining processes, the diversity of political and economic contexts, and the importance of external factors. . . . will provoke discussion on parallels between capitalist agriculture and capitalist industrial organization, and will fuel debates on slave as proletarian, and on the notions of ‘peasant breach’ and the two economies.” —Choice

“[These essays] provide important answers to questions relating to levels of slave subsistence, the material conditions of the enslaved, the control mechanisms of owners, the contexts which generated labor bargaining on the part of the enslaved and the reasons owners/employers acquiesced to laborers’ demands rather than rely on the coercive power of the whip.” —Labor History

“[The] contributors deserve commendation for making salutary advances towards developing an integrated analysis of the history of labouring people in slavery and freedom that transcends the particularities of their legal status.” —Slavery & Abolition

“. . . this collection addresses an important topic and will serve as a valuable resource for scholars and students of comparative slavery in the Americas.” —Judy Bieber, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

The status of labor during slavery and post-emancipation in the Caribbean and the Americas. Contributors investigate the terms under which slaves in the Caribbean, the Southern States, and Latin America worked and how they struggled to establish informal contract terms.

Author Bio

MARY TURNER is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University.

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Table of Contents

Preface
List of Contributors
Introduction

I. Negotiating Slavery/ Informal Contracts & Cash Rewards
1. Chattel Slaves into Wage Slaves: A Jamaican Case Study, Mary Turner
2. Strategies of Slave Subsistence: The Jamaican Case Reconsidered, Richard B. Sheridan
3. Slave Economic Strategies: Food, Markets & Property, Michael Mullin
4. ‘Never on a Sunday?’: Slavery & the Sabbath in Lowcountry Georgia 1750–1830, Betty Wood
5. Work & Resistance in the New Republic: The case of the Chesapeake 1770–1820, Lorena S. Walsh
6. Proto-Proletarians?: Slave Wages in the Americas Between Slave Labour & Free Labour, O. Nigel Bolland
7. Negotiating Freedom in Urban Suriname 1770–1820, Rosemary Brana-Shute
8. A Slow & Extended Abolition: The Case of the Bahamas, 1800–38, Howard D. Johnson

II. Counteracting Freedom/Contract & Coercion
9. Between Slavery & Free Labour: Early Experiments with Free Labour & Patterns of Slave Emanicpation in Brazil & Cuba, Lucia Lamounier
10. Resistance among Asian Plantation Workers in Peru 1870–1920, Michael J. Gonzales
11. The Worker & the Wage in a Plantation Economy: Trinidad in the Late Nineteenth Century, Kusha Haraksingh

III. Achieving Rights for Labour/Confrontation & Collective Bargaining
12. Contested Terrains: Houses, Provision Grounds & the Reconstitution of Labour in Post-Emancipation Martinique, Dale Tomich
13. Post-Emancipation Protest in Jamaica: The Morant Bay Rebellion 1865, Gad Heumann
14. The Pursuit of ‘Higher Wages’ & ‘Perfect Personal Freedom’ in St. Kitts-Nevis 1836–1956, Glen Richards

Index