| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South. By Demetrius L. Eudell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. x, 238 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2680-4. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-5345-3.)

Demetrius L. Eudell began with the profound insight that emancipation might appear in a new light if slavery was primarily regarded not as an economic system, but as a transcendent cultural system. Eudell sought to explain why emancipation in Jamaica and South Carolina—conducted with different strategies—resulted thereafter in what he regarded as strikingly similar situations for black people in the Caribbean and the American South. Limitations on blacks' economic advancement and civic participation in both places were so profound, Eudell suggests, and whites' language of debasement so similar, that to emphasize differences in the emancipation process is to encourage an unwarranted belief in American exceptionalism. His book thus challenges Eric Foner's Nothing but Freedom (1983), a comparative history of emancipations that stressed the radicalism of the brief experiment with interracial democracy in the United States.

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