← New Books Network
New Books Network
Daniel B. Rood, "The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean" (Oxford UP, 2020)
00:41:09
An interview with Daniel B. Rood
Loading summary
Transcript67 lines
- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by White Claw Search Great podcast pick friend. No surprises there. After all, you're all about finding the tastiest flavors out there, just like White Claw Surge. And with big bold flavors to enjoy like blood orange, BlackBerry, cranberry and more, it's time to go all in on taste. Unleash the flavor. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard Seltzer with flavors 8% alcohol by volume White Cloth Seltzer Works Chicago, Illinois.
- [00:28]
B
Running a business comes with a lot of what ifs, but luckily there's a simple answer to Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses including Thrive Cosmetics and Momofuku. And it'll help you with everything you need. From website design and marketing to boosting sales and expanding operations, Shopify can get the job done and make your dream a reality. Turn those what ifs into Sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer.
- [00:58]
A
The holidays have arrived at the Home Depot and we're here to help bring the excitement with decor for every part of your home. Check out our wide assortment of easy to assemble pre lit trees so you can spend less time setting up and more time celebrating. And bring your holiday spirit outdoors with unique decor like one of our Santa inflatables. Whatever your style, find the right pieces at the right prices this holiday season at the Home Depot. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:34]
B
Hello and welcome to New Books in Caribbean Studies. I'm Alejandra Bronfman. My guest today is Dan Rood. He's the author of the Reinvention of Atlantic Technology, Labor, Race and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean. Published by Oxford in 2020. The book sweeps through the Atlantic world and examines the changes in the technologies that processed, stored and transported commodities like sugar, flour and coffee. He shows readers the ways that changes in the machinery and technology were driven by and connected to slavery and the enslaved people who often had the highest level of expertise about these machines. It's really fascinating. Hi Dan, thanks for joining me today.
- [02:13]
A
Oh, it's going to be fun. I'm looking forward to the conversation.
- [02:18]
B
Let's start with a title, actually, and I want to get into the details obviously in a bit. But, but can you talk about what what is being reinvented here in Atlantic Slavery?
- [02:29]
A
Sure. So the, the book in a, in a sense was kind of written in response to the emphasis over the past decade or so on the cotton south and its kind of unidirectional relationship with, with England and with Liverpool industry in particular, and to show that the worlds of slavery and capitalism and technology were a lot sort of more multifaceted and multipolar than that picture kind of leaves us with. But that didn't happen sort of by accident. That, that happened because, you know, groups of slaveholders in different parts of the Americas found themselves in the need, particularly after Haitian Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution, of finding new ways to exploit racialized labor to turn a profit. And so the book is not only about technological reinventions that happen in the plantation worlds of the early to mid 19th century, but also, in a sense, reinventing slavery based political economies.
- [03:43]
B
Yeah, that. It's a big project. Right. And I guess I want to talk about the geographic scope a little bit. You go to Cuba, Brazil, Richmond, New Orleans a little bit. And these are places that actually aren't thought of together often. And in part your argument is about how they got connected. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how that works. And I have to say that when, when I, when I was reading a lot of your book, this, this book by. This quote by Mintz kept resonating in my head. I don't know if I'm not going to be able to reproduce it. But it's the, it's the quote where he sort of talks about the enslaved labor produced the income to, to run, you know, the factories that produced the shackles that then got shipped back to, to. To keep them in place. Like there's this kind of, this kind of network of connection and, and economies of, of labor that. It seemed like you were tapping into that as well.
- [04:46]
A
Yeah, well, I sort of hear two, two, two different questions there. The second one is about. Is about the role of enslaved people themselves in, in these reinventions. And there's this sort of, I guess maybe sort of a tragic trope to the book, which is that these, the technological reinvention in particular, which sort of maintain and expand profitability in slavery in Virginia and in Cuba and in Brazil, don't happen without the contributions of enslaved people. So enslaved people are both central to sort of, you know, tightening the shackles of their own enslavement in a sense, but also at the same time constantly challenge that enslavement and in part through the sort of desirability of their, of their sort of mechanical skills and knowledge. So there's this kind of dialectic at the heart of that reinvention which has enslaved people at the center of both reproducing and threatening to undo the continued expansion of Atlantic slavery.
- [05:51]
B
Right, yeah. And so can you talk about the geographic connections?
- [05:55]
A
Yeah. So did you, do you want me to tell you this sort of store, like how I started kind of tracing these.
- [06:05]
B
Yeah, I'm really interested in, in, in how that, in how you sort of figured out that all these places were so connected. Because that's, that's the part of the, the book that when you're telling those stories, I just, it blows me away because on the one hand it seems so obvious once you state it, but nobody, it just hadn't, I hadn't thought of all of those, those kinds of connections.
- [06:26]
A
So I, I don't, I don't often. I don't typically consider myself as like a traditional sort of archives based historian who says things like, just follow what you find in the archives. But ironically, that is kind of how this happened. When I was sort of an early doctoral student, I'd become interested in, you know, you know, very basic stuff about employment and exploitation of enslaved people outside of agriculture, so what's called industrial slavery. And I had planned on doing this grad seminar paper on the Tredigar Ironworks, which was this, you know, among certain Civil War historians is this kind of famous company that manufactures all this railroad equipment for the Confederacy, but used large numbers of enslaved people to do so before the Civil War as well. But when I went to the archives and they have this fantastic collection at the Library of Virginia in Richmond on like the first day, I started finding this correspondence with Cuban railroad companies. And that was very surprising to me because the story of this company had always been told in a very sort of Southern nationalist kind of vein. And yet there was this whole sort of submerged, transnational Caribbean imperial slavery story that hadn't been told. So having some Spanish and some experience in Latin America, I was sort of fortunate enough to be equipped to pursue that story. And that was the first piece of it. And then because of the way research funding works for graduate students, I got money to spend a bunch of time in the archives in Cuba and got a lot more immersed in the sugar industry than I ever thought that I would. And that had its own sort of, you know, you know, unthought of geographic repercussions. One of which is the story that I sort of revise about Cuban sugar is that there'd been this argument that Cuban sugar had made Cuba a sort of neo colony of the US going back to the early 19th century. But actually its connections with, with English capital are actually more important to Cuban planters and merchants than the US connection is till quite late in the 19th century. So that's another kind of geographic difference. And then the Brazil piece, which we can talk more about the sort of, kind of difficulties of doing that part of, was one of those old stories of showing up in the archives in Virginia and one of the archivists there, who's also a historian, saying, hey, has anyone talked to you about the flour mills in Richmond? And I was like, I've never thought about a flour mill once in my entire life. What's what? And he just started telling me, you know, the story that I end up telling in the book, which is that there's some of the sort of largest kind of unified factory enterprises in the United states in the 1850s, and a lot of the stuff is, is going to Brazil. So certain people kind of knew that this existed, but they sort of, in a way functioned on the margins of the discourse of Atlantic slavery. They're more like Civil War scholars who happen to know these things. And so, yeah, so then it's just a matter of just continuing to try to untangle those threads of connection and to figure out why those geographic connections made sense for the people who engineered them.
- [10:10]
B
Right. And then sort of the, the next layer that comes in the book is that those commodities, the sugar, the flour, the coffee, and how they're all really interrelated. And so, I mean, I, I just, I want to. I wonder if you can talk more about what happens when you put all of those in the same analytical lens. I think that you've talked a little bit about sort of decentering the nationalist US story, but is there anything else?
- [10:39]
A
I think that a big part of the explanation lies in perishability. What, you know, what, what makes a lot of these kind of industrial technological developments that I talk about make sense and bring and bring profit is the idea of shelf life. You know, that like the, the, the re. The reason that, you know, every Latin Americanist and every Caribbeanist is very familiar with those, I would call them, you know, fetishized images of the large scale mechanized sugar mills.
- [11:20]
B
Right.
- [11:21]
A
They're, they're very famous. And one of the things that I wanted to do is kind of, you know, get beyond the mystifications that those images can leave you with and figure out, you know, the, these are really expensive, high risk pieces of equipment that people were not accustomed to purchasing or use them or maintaining. So there had to be a really good reason to do it. So, so what were those reasons? And it's really about making the kinds of sugars that aren't Going to rot in the warehouses of, of Havana or in the ship holds going across the Atlantic or on store shelves in London. And a lot of the flour mill stuff is the same thing. They engage in all that mechanization because consumers in Brazil are sick of opening up their flour and it being full of maggots.
- [12:17]
B
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com right. And they're all kind of, I mean, I guess what was interesting to me was that they were in this kind of system of circulation where the coffee was being exchanged for the flour and then the sugar was in there too. And it was this kind of, I mean, we're used to these, these kinds of commodities circulating, but these were, I thought that these were a, a kind of new, new set of commodities circulating in slightly different ways than what we've, what we usually hear about.
- [13:12]
A
Yeah, yeah, I agree with, I agree with that.
- [13:15]
B
So I, I want to talk about technology because the detail in the book is just kind of dazzling. And a couple of times I wondered if you have background in how these machines work or how did you learn all of that stuff, because it was really, it was really impressive to read about how all of these machines work and the understanding that you had to have to sort of figure all of that out. So I would love to hear more about that. But also, and here's the second part of the question, you managed always to tie it back to labor and to local circumstances. So the idea that the machines weren't just plopped down, but that they had to sort of respond to and were made in part out of the local circumstances and the people who were using them, which were often enslaved people.
- [14:09]
A
Well, thank you. I worked really hard to maintain the unity of that system. And it didn't come easily at all because it's really, it's really easy to sort of, I guess. Okay, so yeah, there's like a few questions in a row that you asked, all of which are really good questions. So I'll try to work my way through them and please, like jump in.
- [14:38]
B
Okay.
- [14:40]
A
I don't, I didn't come in with any training or sort of familiarity or, or comfort with technology at all but what I, what I increasingly saw in the literature on slavery and capitalism and this, this is different now than it was when I was in like the early 2000s, when I was starting this, this stuff. But at the time it seemed like there were a lot of like just sort of like simple gestures at technologies like steam engines and railroads and vacuum pans without a real engagement with the objects themselves, without sort of like tearing them apart and asking like, like why, like why do they come to function the way that they do? What kind of role did they play? And I just sort of kept this faith that, that like a sustained engagement with technological specificity would have broader analytical payoff for people who don't really care about ma. But there was a long time when I was just like, for example, you know, reading primary sources about Cuban sugar mills and just trying to figure out how these different machines worked without any, any broader sense of, of like the, you know, the sort of human relationships that, that made them count. And I, I got familiar with them by sort of just getting nerdy about it. I started going to like, I would just start visiting old flower mills in Virginia that are now sort of like museum and park pieces and just spending a lot of time looking at how they worked. It will not surprise you that up in, up in New England there are a bunch of hobbyists who want to restart old grist mills to produce off the grid electric power. An organization called called spoom, which is Society for the Protection of Old Mills. I joined in 2010 and I went on a tour in New Hampshire, this sort of day long bus tour with all these folks. And we just went and like looked at these reconstructed Briston flour mills and I could sort of, you know, go into the basement and like watch a water wheel function and start to spin these ge and so stuff like that really helped. And also in grad school I, I took an auto shop class at the local community college which mostly like people who wanted to become professional auto mechanics would take. And that helped a lot too.
- [17:29]
B
So you did, you did seek out. But what about the, what about the sugar mills? Because I don't know if there are any around that you were able to actually look at of the kinds that you were talking about. And you also talked about a couple of different kind. So how did you become familiar with those?
- [17:47]
A
The older kind, you know, the famous Jamaica train kind and still see those on plantations in Louisiana. The Whitney plantation has some pretty intact materials on the grounds. The interesting thing is the more sort of industrial modern stuff that I really focus on, you can't really find in, in Cuba because I think most of that stuff was sort of replaced over time by 20th century Central technologies and haven't been sort of museumized in the way that the early 19th century stuff was. So I didn't get to see. I got to walk into a, to an abandoned 20th century sugar factory in Puerto Rico which you could sort of walk around in. And that helped a lot. But again, a lot of the expensive machinery was I'm sure, sold off long ago. But you could sort of get a sense of the spatiality of these big, of these big factories. But yeah, that, that was sort of more book learning based.
- [18:55]
B
Yeah. And so was the, was the relationship to what some people call users or to local circumstances, the ways that enslaved people actually shaped the machines and the ways they work? But was that in the, was that in the sources or did you just kind of, did you have to surmise that to a certain extent?
- [19:18]
A
Well, I hope it was in the sources.
- [19:23]
B
You know what I mean? I'm not accusing you.
- [19:27]
A
I. No, I mean I, I think I found, I think I found evidence for it. It's, it's sort of, it's sort of different in different cases, you know. You know what's interesting, what's always interesting to me is the sort of like, you know, the discourse of, of slaveholders about the sort of incapacity of, of non white labor and in like the very same sentence talking about, you know, like the dependence on, on black labor in these kind of mechanized spaces.
- [20:03]
B
Right.
- [20:05]
A
So sometimes you do sort of have to read, read against the grain, but a lot of times you just have to read to the next sentence where they contradict what they said.
- [20:13]
B
Yeah, I mean I actually that was one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is that you, you do talk about these kinds of new, new ways of working, new ways of sort of being a worker. But also, and the ways that the machines kind of produce those also they produce new forms of resistance and mobilization and compliance. But then there's a kind of dance that you, that you talk about between sort of acknowledging and in some case, in some cases actually exploiting the, the knowledge that people that enslaved people had and their expertise and knowing full well that these machines would not run without them. But then the tension between that and the kind of continual fear, the punishment, the regimes of repression and starvation, which you also wish. You also talk about. And how much did that vary over space and time? Did you see a kind of arc of kind of movement in that. In. In one direction or another?
- [21:13]
A
Well, no, I think it. I think it varied across. Across the spaces that I looked at. I mean, no, nowhere beyond the Cuban sugar mill did I see the, like, the new spatial architecture of industrial sugar making and the new ideas of kind of a racist hierarchy be so clearly intertwined and mutually reinforcing.
- [21:40]
B
Right.
- [21:40]
A
So this new idea, you know, in the 1840s that, you know, that Chinese workers sort of being machine like in themselves belong inside the sugar mill and, and. And black workers kind of belong in the sort of less technologically intensive but more coercive fields and there being this kind of like subtle gradation, none of that actually being practiced on the ground, but it being a central way in which planters and engineers kind of reimagine their own processes of production. I never saw that so sort of neatly imagined in other places. Again, I want to sort of re. Emphasize that that was never the reality on the ground in the sugar mills, but it, but it was a really sort of important kind of imaginative tool for the people deciding to invest in these new systems.
- [22:39]
B
Right. Yeah. And I guess related to that is something that you. You brought up very briefly just in that last answer, but I wanted to talk about as well, is this idea that runs throughout the book about whiteness and race and the production of knowledge about whiteness and race. That's, that's sort of going on at the same time, the relationship of that to. To kind of ideas about purity and technology and consumption. I've thought a lot about Ortiz and Mins kind of together when you were. When you were writing about those kinds of issues. And can you walk us through that argument about whiteness that, that you, that you. That. That kind of echoes throughout the book.
- [23:22]
A
I'm trying. I'm trying to remember. I'll do my best. So I, I mean, and this is like a sort of interpretive gambit in the book that I, I've kind of gotten most push back on. But it. I. I feel like it. It's easy. It's. It's easy to make the move that, like, okay, people like. People like white sugar because. Because white skin was more valued or something like that. I, I'm not saying that. I'm trying to say something more specific than that. That what? Like that the connection between whiteness and value and blackness and a different kind of value undergo this transformation in this world of the second slavery. I talk about in the book, and I think, you know, it's most clear in the case of sugar, but it's definitely pretty clear in the case of flour as well that like, like the wider, the wider that mechanical technologies are able to make these products, the, the more kind of value accrues to them. But it's like particular kinds of value, like not just whiteness, but like fineness and dryness and purity and kind of resistance to decay and sort of, you know, brownness and blackness are sort of reposited as sort of like ever present threats, particularly within sugar. Like when sugar sort of breaks down, it becomes this kind of brown sugar and it can even burn and become black and completely without value. But there's this idea, there's this way in which these colors and the values they come with get recast the early 19th century in kind of analogical ways in the world of commodity and the world of biological racist thinking. And I try to sort of draw out how specific those similarities were in the hopes of making this argument that the world of commodities and the world of racist thinking are kind of informing one another. And I'm not sure how successfully I did that.
- [25:42]
B
Well, I think, I think there, it does, it does resonate, right. And there's probably not a way that you're going to, you know, draw sort of very direct connections or, or, or, or you know, make that kind of a, of an argument. But the idea that the, the value and the privileging of white, you know, white food, anybody who has kids knows oh my God, you know, white bread, White bread is the thing, right? And so there is a relation, it does seem like there is a relationship to purity and food and race and kind of the kinds of, you know, caste hierarchies that exist in Latin America that they seem, they seem to reinforce one another if not being completely, you know, kind of causally related or something.
- [26:35]
A
So one of the things I thought was really interesting that came out of the sort of commodity discussion about color is whiteness becomes associated with value, but also with like frailty and evanescence. Like it's this thing that you can strive toward but never quite full, never quite fully get there. And if you get there, if you're able to sort of isolate it from all these pollutants, it always threatens to break, to break down with a sort of invasion or incursion of non whiteness which is like molasses in the case of sugar. And 19th century biological, like sort of early biological racists are starting to think about, about white skin in the same kind of way. Like, like it's actually brownness and blackness that are kind of like rope, like like robust and unavoidable and actually natural. And so what, what these kind of like, you know, plantation food scientists, I guess you could call it, they're not interested in giving you something natural. They're interested in extracting this, this, this valuable, sweet, unspoilable lifelessness from the core of this kind of natural world of the farm. And that's where value lies and kind of like stillness of the organic process.
- [27:58]
B
But it's also seems to be a value that's accrued but then hidden because it has to do with all of the labor that goes into producing those very quote, unquote pure products.
- [28:08]
A
Right, right, exactly. And it's that very anxiety about the indispensability of, of non white makers making this pure whiteness that makes these, these, these closed off, vacuum sealed, you know, you know, instrument analyzed machines so seductive to so many elite planters. Because they can get, that, they can actually get a sort of like this illusion of kind of medical insulatedness from pollution.
- [28:40]
B
Yeah. Kind of sterility or something.
- [28:42]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [28:43]
B
Yeah, yeah. So, sources, we talked a little bit about sources. I, I'm always happy to talk more about sources, but in particular images. You use a lot of images in the book and I would love to hear more about how you found them and, and how you decided to use certain images over others and what they, what they, what they tell you, what they told you as you were doing the research.
- [29:09]
A
I think that my model for using images is Fernand Braudel. He never uses images as decoration. They're always used as sources that merit analysis. And I love some of my favorite parts of his books are the captions of the images that he uses. So I really wanted to get away from particular, in particular with the images of the sugar mills. I, I, I really wanted to get away from just using them to sort of impart. I, I feel like sometimes like, like those images and the images of like a tr, of like a train going by a Cuban plantation are almost like they're kind of plugged in to like assume that the reader will interpret for themselves. Kind of like, oh, there's this crazy thing going on. There's like machinery and slavery. So guess what? Slavery is modern and it's capitalist. Without ever actually sort of digging down into like the story of those localities and what that machine is, what it's doing there, you know, who put it there and why, how it works and why that matters. So I use the images of the sugar mills, not, not to do that, but actually to sort of add like, make my explanations more clear of this machinery. I'm still really insecure about, like, how much technological explication there is in the book. Because I, when I read, when I read history, I, I, I sometimes I get bored when I read monographs, and sometimes I, I felt like, oh, man, like, who's going to want to read this stuff? But I, but I did it anyway now. And I think I used the images to make sure that readers who are interested enough to actually go through the explanations would have an aid there to understand it. Because I feel like a lot of times there's this sense that, oh, God, all that stuff looks so crazy. I'm never going to be able to understand what all those machines do. And it's actually not that hard. And if I can figure it out, anybody can, because I'm not technologically, I don't. I'm not like a gearhead at all. In fact, quite the opposite.
- [31:29]
B
Well, I think that, I mean, I, I was, I was going to ask you what, how you think of the technology and what you think it's doing in the book. But I guess I would venture to say that it's there for the people who want it, certainly, and it is. And, and that the book makes a case for really understanding how it works, whether you're going to dive deep or not. That, that it is. There is a kind of important gesture because there's. Because the technology and the slavery were, in fact, in the same space, and we don't often talk about them together. And so just the very fact that they're put together there really sort of says something important.
- [32:15]
A
Yeah. Thank you. Yeah.
- [32:16]
B
Okay, good.
- [32:21]
A
I think that. I think that's a good way of thinking about it. Do you think I sometimes say to my graduate students, like, okay, no matter what you study, whether it's policy, whether it's like the pol. Whether it's like, reproductive, like, politics of reproduction, whether it's, you know, I don't know, mercantilism, whether it's history of ideas, no matter what it is, like, become an expert on how things work, you know, And I think in the case of your work, it's about sort of, you know, you know, radios and transmission and sound. Right. So do you, do you think that is, like, was a particular burden for me, or do you think in any book you just, like, there's this sort of, like, nerd process that you have to do to do a good job, no matter what the topic is?
- [33:10]
B
Well, I think that the payoff is, is, is important. Right. Because what happens when you, when you kind of dig down as you did, is that you understand things about the bigger picture that you wouldn't otherwise understand if you didn't understand how the machines work. Because people work with machines, have a lot of. They have this kind of embodied knowledge and they used the machines in certain, in particular ways and that just becomes a really important part of the story.
- [33:43]
A
Yeah. Maybe it's just the sort of commitment to know as much about the stuff you're looking at as the historical actors who had to work with them.
- [33:53]
B
Right. Yeah. And, and it's hard. And you know this. One of the reasons that I was so interested in this book is because it's not, it's not easy to figure out how these kinds of things worked precisely because a lot of times the knowledge is, is transmitted from worker to worker and there aren't, you know, manuals or any. I mean, if you ever try to read a manual about anything, you know that that's not how people learn about how anything works.
- [34:17]
A
Right, right.
- [34:18]
B
So it's a, it's a, it's really, it's really interesting to, to kind of think about it that way. So one thing that you don't talk about very much, and I know, and I'm. I know there wasn't room and it's not what the book is about, but something that, that I was thinking about a lot as I was reading it is how the landscape itself was changing as a result of all of the building. There's the canals, there's the harbors, there's the big iron, you know, warehouse that you talk about in, in Havana. That is basically, it sounded like it was made on an, a new piece of land or something like that. So the role of the land and the water, agriculture, all of those things are just changing all of the time and in kind of spectacular ways. And I would love to hear you sort of talk more about that and the role that it plays in the book.
- [35:11]
A
Yeah, I mean, I was definitely, I was definitely like centrally interested in like sort of infrastructural landscapes in particular. And less ironically for me, because in the years since the book, I've become much more engaged in agricultural history. I don't actually talk about agriculture that much in this book.
- [35:34]
B
Right.
- [35:37]
A
So most of the land, most of the landscape stuff I talk about. Yeah. Is, is, is, you know, like you said, our canals and railroads and sort of, you know, artificially human made landscapes and in the bays and waterways and what I. And those are reinventions as well. Those are Technologies as well. And what I wanted to get at is the ways in which those different infrastructural commitments by, you know, colonial states and elites had sort of, you know, like repercussions for the distribution of economic power amongst different groups. You know, I have this. The whole chapter about the warehouse revolution in Havana harbor is really about in the wake of this, of, of this massive slave uprising and an even more massive repression of it called La Escalera, really contributes to this, to this very large renovation of the whole way in which sugar is shipped in and out of Havana Harbor. But really it's about breaking the power of black control dock worker groups on the old sort of colonial Havana wharves. It's not about that whole story necessarily, but you can't separate the class conflict from the sort of efficiencies of moving sugar in a more industrial way.
- [37:12]
B
Right. Yeah. So I've taken up a lot of your time. I have two last questions. One is just to ask you about the kind of US historiographic perspective. I can, you know, coming from the Caribbean or Latin Americanist perspective, I can see how this is a really important book for the Cuban or the Brazilian historiography. But what do you think it does to the US Historiography?
- [37:42]
A
Well, the Thai period that I study, the spotlight has been almost exclusively on the cotton south for a long time. And some recent, you know, like very big, very wonderful, influential books, Sven Beckert's book and Walter Johnson at Baptist are the three big ones, have, have really sort of, you know, brightened, even brightened the spotlight on the cotton Southwest even more. And there's this idea that the sort. The quote unquote, old south, which is this sort of, you know, Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, basically function as ways to produce more cheap enslaved people for. To sell to the cotton Southwest. And my book shows that there is still a lot more going on in those sort of older south states than get talked about in that historiography. So it's sort of saying, like, we still need to pay attention to what's happening here.
- [38:44]
B
I see. Yeah. That's great. So you, you mentioned very briefly that you're thinking about agriculture now. Is that a new project?
- [38:54]
A
Yeah, I'm. I'm writing a. I'm writing a book on the plantation in American history From basically the 1650s to the present day for, for a trifer live right for a trip for a trade press. And it's, it's. It's us. It's US focused. But it starts, it starts in the Caribbean. It starts in Barbados, of course, but really starts with the English agricultural revolution in the 17th century, because a lot of the first sugar planters and Barbados are sort of are sort of refugees of the English Revolution and, and get pushed out of certain parts of England and want to get their land and their wealth back. And they make it happen by pioneering the slate plant at Barbados, and that eventually gets transferred to South Carolina and Georgia and on and on. So. But the new book is much more about, you know, plantations writ large and not necessarily the sort of industrial shadows of those plantations.
- [40:00]
B
That sounds fascinating. I will look forward to it.
- [40:03]
A
I look forward to writing it.
- [40:06]
B
Thanks so much for talking to me today. Yeah.
- [40:09]
A
This is really fun.
- [40:10]
B
Thanks.
- [40:10]
A
Alejandra.