"C.L..R. James' 1938 seminal text, The Black Jacobins, and Eric Williams' 1944 tour de force, Capitalism and Slavery, constitute much more than foundational works in West Indian nationalist historiography. Both authors, born in colonial Trinidad and writing Caribbean history within its Atlantic context, made significant contributions to development discourse within the traditions of Enlightenment Idealism. As critical realists they considered popular historiography indispensable to any attempt to root philosophical ideals within recognizable terms of everyday living. In The Black Jacobins, James documents the struggles of the enslaved peoples of St. Dominique, the mercantile showpiece of French colonial capitalism in the West Indies for freedom and social justice. In addition, he details the transformation of this successful anti-slavery rebellion into something much more elaborate in terms of Atlantic history--the creation of Haiti, the Caribbean's first nation-state. In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams expands and develops the paradigm of African labor enslavement and European capital liberation, first outlined by James in The Black Jacobins, that became the basis of the revolutionary reorganization of productivity for European economic development." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
333 p, Contents: Plantations, sugar cane, and slavery / Sidney M. Greenfield -- Indian labor and new world plantations : European demands and Indian responses in northeastern Brazil / Stuart B. Schwartz -- Slave families on a rural estate in colonial Brazil / Richard Graham -- African slave trade and economic development in Amazonia, 1700-1800 / Colin M. MacLachlan -- Encomienda, African slavery, and agriculture in seventeenth-century Caracas / Robert J. Ferry -- Slaves in Piedmont Virginia, 1720-1790 / Philip D. Morgan and Michael L. Nicholls -- Plantations, paternalism, and profitability : factors affecting African demography in the old British Empire / Daniel C. Littlefield -- Tale of two plantations : slave life at Mesopotamia in Jamaica and Mount Airy in Virginia, 1799-1828 / Richard S. Dunn -- Slaves and slave masters on eighteenth century St. John / Karen Fog Olwig -- Tousssaint Louverture and the slaves of the Bréda plantations / David Geggus -- Freedom and oppression of slaves in the eighteenth century Caribbean / Arthur L. Stinchcombe -- Was the plantation slave a proletarian? / Sidney W. Mintz
