|
|
|
Matthew Pratt Guterl
Washington State University
|
As the Atlantic slave trade dwindled into nothingness in the nineteenth century, millions of European and Asian peoples (whether free or under contract) poured into the labor-starved regions of South America, the British West Indies, the Spanish Caribbean, and North America.1 Southerners in the United States were economically, culturally, and socially connected to the global experience of emancipation and labor adjustment in the Americas, sometimes profiting from the trade in free laborers or with slaveholding societies, sometimes owning property in the Spanish Caribbean or the British West Indies, and sometimes discussing what went on in other places as object lessons in the political economy of a post-emancipatory world. But, looking backwards, historians of the United States have been apt to use the rigid, late twentieth-century boundaries of that country to fit the square peg of the South into the round hole of "America." Outside of a small handful of comparative works, few have attempted to understand the experience of emancipation in the Deep South from a comparative perspective, and fewer still from a global one.2 The South's place in "the Plantation complex," that improbably diffuse international network of economic, political, and human relations that matured with the institution of slavery and was transformed in the wake of its demise, remains largely forgotten.3 |
1
|
|
This comparative essay attempts to remedy this forgetfulness. It does so through a consideration of two groups during the United States Civil War and its immediate aftermath: American expatriates to Cuba and cash crop planters in the Deep South. It specifically explores their experiences in light of the nineteenth-century diffusion of immigrant and coerced labor from Europe and Asia and the experience of emancipation in the Caribbean and in the United States. This essay is, therefore, an attempt to bridge the gap between the historiography on the United States and the fields of world and global history. It suggests that comparisons between these places—specifically between the United States South and the broader Americas—cannot merely be juxtapositions that emphasize parallels or divergences, but, rather, must also employ a global perspective that takes into account the history of other white settler colonies and tropical dependencies. Comparisons, as historian Frederick Cooper writes, are "valuable," but they can take us "much further from being able to do global history or the history of connections."4 Likewise, those who write histories of the United States in the Caribbean—in Cuba, Haiti, and Mexico, to name just three places—must not read "the American Century" into the past, forgetting in the process just how contingent and unpredictable was the dominance of later years. Here, then, is a moment at which the United States was, despite its reassuring rhetoric to the contrary, just one of many white settler colonies in the New World struggling to stay alive. |
. . . |
There are about 13845 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
