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History Workshop Journal, Issue 72, Autumn 2011, pp. 301-310 (Review)
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scholars, regardless of their political views. All of this and more is on display in this collection. Margaret Hunt is Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College, Massachusetts. She recently published Women in Eighteenth-century Europe (Longman, 2010) and she is now at work on a study of the seventeenth-century English East India Company.
NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 For an overview of the permutations of the History Workshop Journal see Barbara Taylor, ‘History Workshop Journal’ in Making History, Institute of Historical Research, London: http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/HWJ.html 2 Joanna Innes, ‘Origins of the Factory Acts: the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802’, in Law, Crime and English Society, 1660-1840, ed. Norma Landau, Cambridge, 2002. 3 Joanna Innes, ‘Legislating for Three Kingdoms: How the Westminster Parliament Legislated for England, Scotland and Ireland, 1707-1830’, in Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1660-1850, ed. Julian Hoppit, Manchester, 2003. 4 See especially the oft-cited essay by Innes and John Styles, ‘The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies 25, 1986. 5 See their English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipal Corporation Act, 9 vols, London, 1909-29.
doi:10.1093/hwj/dbr047 Advance Access Publication 31 August 2011
Before the Deluge by Peter Gatrell Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2009, xii þ 239 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-7592-4.
Both sides loved Russia: the Slavophiles as a mother, the Westernisers as a child N. Berdiaev, The Russian Idea, London, 1947, p. 39. Laura Engelstein’s volume of interrelated essays (most of them previously published) advances a deceptively simple argument, namely that for much
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of the nineteenth and twentieth century Russia failed to adopt the tenets of Western liberalism and instead fell sway to the powerful forces of anti-liberalism. Brief glimmers of hope – the aftermath of the February 1917 revolution and the period immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 – were extinguished, ensuring that the liberal aspiration for the rule of law and a flourishing civil society would be a false dawn. At certain other times too (and to adopt a different metaphor), the instruments of autocratic rule were blunted. The 1905 revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to accept an elected parliament and some civil rights, but the promise of liberal government quickly faded as conservative forces regained the initiative. One consequence of the heavy hand of authoritarian rule was, Engelstein argues, the attractiveness of revolution for many members of the Russian intelligentsia whose liberal credentials were also in doubt. This broad argument is made primarily in relation to the final decades of the Russian empire, so neither Prince Georgii L’vov, the first prime minister of the Provisional Government, nor Yegor Gaidar, the embodiment of post-Soviet liberal aspirations, make an appearance in this book. We are offered instead a thoughtful account of the trials and tribulations of the tsarist state, its defenders and its critics, as well as insights into underlying ideas about the proper place of religion, science and morality in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia. According to Engelstein the tsarist state faced the challenge of how to develop Russia whilst at the same time managing the social and cultural consequences of its development. No sooner had Catherine the Great appeared to adopt Enlightenment tenets of scientific reasoning in the course of modernization than Russia had to grapple with the implications of this new ethos for the Orthodox Church, a basic prop of autocratic rule. Nor were these dilemmas the exclusive preserve of the monarchy, government officials and Church leaders. The Russian intelligentsia confronted the same issues. But while some ‘Westernizers’ entertained hopes of greater civil rights and a respect for secular opinion, others – ‘Slavophiles’ – maintained that Russia had a distinctive mission that was built upon non-Western legal norms and Orthodox religious belief, setting Russia apart from the legacy bequeathed to the West by Roman jurisprudence and the Catholic tradition. Part of that distinctiveness was supposedly enshrined in the peasant land commune, which was thought to embody collective rather than individualistic ideas and practices. Not for nothing did the philosopher Konstantin Aksakov describe the commune as a ‘moral choir’ that required peasants to sing from the same hymn sheet. The Slavophiles detected and celebrated an authentically ‘Russian’ adherence to customary law. Their antipathy towards Western law was shared to a degree by arch-conservative officials who resented the restrictions imposed on the Tsar’s autocratic rule. This body of opinion and constellation of forces allowed little space for liberalism to establish itself in Russia.1 These themes recur in a series of chapters on law, religion and culture.
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There is of course a more complicated story to tell, and Engelstein is too subtle and knowledgeable a historian not to acknowledge these other elements. The tsarist state engaged with rather than ignored its critics, at least those of a liberal rather than an uncompromising radical persuasion. The state was also a dynamic entity and demonstrated a capacity to embrace reform at a philosophical as well as a practical level, such that ‘the Enlightenment became the language of legitimacy as well as opposition’ (p. 39). In addition, the emergence in the later nineteenth century of what was discursively constructed as ‘educated society’, tsenzovoe obshchestvo (as distinct from the Russian narod or plebeian society), pointed to a tendency for the Russian intelligentsia and professional associations to engage both with an emerging popular movement and with representatives of the regime. Thus, to take one important example, it was possible for civil servants and government critics among the educated middle class to make common cause in supporting a paternalist labour policy when they thought that capitalist enterprise needed to be restrained.2 Certain ideas and episodes nevertheless exposed an antagonistic relationship between state and society. These included the Decembrist uprising in 1825 and the Polish revolt in 1830, profoundly significant moments of elite resistance to tsarist authority. Engelstein also reminds us that the second great challenge to tsarist rule in Poland (in 1862-3) coincided with the era of great reforms, and indeed she suggests that the upsurge of anti-tsarist sentiment in Warsaw was made possible by state weakness. This gave rise to a ‘national conversation’ (p. 46) involving bureaucrats, landlords, lawyers, economists, students and others, which resulted in epoch-making changes to the agrarian order, to local government and to the legal system. By the 1880s, however, the monarchy and its chief defenders had renounced any further liberal drift in favour of ‘counter-reform’. Something similar happened again during 1904-6, when liberal and radical forces combined to extract major political concessions from the Tsar. This time liberalism retreated in the face of revolutionary activism. On each occasion reform was combined with swift retribution towards the Tsar’s rebellious subjects. All the same, the ground had begun to shift. The new courts provided dissidents and conspirators with the oxygen of publicity, contrary to government expectations that they would discredit the opposition in the eyes of ordinary Russians. Justice now had to be seen to be done. In a chapter on ‘the theatre of public life’, Engelstein suggests that the ‘traditional’ instruments of punishment for traitors – ritual public humiliation and execution, such as befell the Decembrist leadership – lost much of their force when a reformed legal system took hold. To be sure, there was still space in the later nineteenth century for the ‘public posture’ of the dissident and the creation and circulation of myths around the oppositional figure. More broadly, the legal system energized the public sphere, even if few contemporaries appreciated the significance of this development. But state officials certainly understood what was at stake. Some merely ‘played with
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judicial reform’ (p. 21) and backed emergency measures whereby civilians were brought before military courts. This narrowed the options for accommodation between the state and educated society, and strengthened mutual antagonism (pp. 81-3).3 These arguments are brought together in a key chapter on ‘combined and uneven development’ (first published in 1993), in which Engelstein suggests that ‘the Russian example represents the superimposition of the three models of power chronologically separated (however imperfectly) in Foucault’s scheme, the so-called juridical monarchy, the Polizeistaat and the modern disciplinary regime’. She is adamant that the regime of ‘power/ knowledge’ never came into its own in the Russian context (p. 19). Russia paid a heavy price for the failure of liberalism to achieve ascendancy, namely the lack of a law-governed society. What is more, as she demonstrated in her earlier work on the discourse of liberalism, revolutionary violence in 1905 led to a great deal of soul-searching within the Russian intelligentsia, for whom greater self-discipline and a clearer moral code became the necessary means of distinguishing the prospective citizen from the mob. The famous publication Vekhi (Landmarks) allowed a procession of distinguished intellectuals to repudiate revolution in favour of an uncompromising adherence to law and property.4 It should be clear from the foregoing remarks that the Russian intelligentsia plays a crucial part in Engelstein’s argument. Slavophiles specified sobornost’ (‘communalism’) as the fundamental component of popular piety of a sort that should be applauded, and they correspondingly lambasted the closeness between the established church and the tsarist regime. In a chapter entitled ‘Orthodox self-reflection in a modernising age’, she provides an illuminating discussion of Slavophile authors such as Ivan Kireevskii (1806-56) for whom a ‘wholeness of being’ was present in Eastern Orthodoxy and needed to be sustained in the face of the challenge of the Enlightenment (p. 133). Kireevskii denounced the self-absorption that he thought characteristic of Western society; ‘selfless love’ was the ideal to which he aspired. (His personal life, alas, provided abundant evidence of his self-centredness.) Nevertheless, popular spirituality could present an uncomfortable challenge, particularly when it took the form of sectarianism. Russia’s sects troubled Slavophiles and government alike, but official opprobrium and persecution did not prevent sectarians of all stripes from finding places to settle and sometimes to thrive.5 War and religion occupy a particular place in this story, as the moment when sections of the intelligentsia drew upon reserves of Orthodoxy in order to construct a patriotic iconography. In a chapter on ‘the old Slavophile steed: failed nationalism and the philosophers’ Jewish problem’, Engelstein offers a brief discussion of currents of anti-Semitism that were already circulating widely during the Russo-Turkish War, when Jews were accused of profiteering, and she also suggests that Russian troops drew upon reserves of popular religious belief in targeting Jews during the First World
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War. She is right to point out that many government officials and parliamentarians drank deeply at the well of anti-Semitism, which received the imprimatur of new bodies such as the St. Petersburg Religious-Philosophical Society (pp. 194-5). In 1914, extremist views of German barbarism now became a fairly respectable expression of patriotism, and the publicist Vladimir Ern described the war as a struggle between Orthodox Christianity against Protestantism. But he was roundly condemned by liberal politicians such as Evgenii Trubetskoi who demanded that Russia dismount from ‘the old Slavophile steed’ in favour of a universalist humanism that entailed embracing ‘the spiritual unity of peoples’ and abandoning the search for nationhood (p. 209). However, as Randall Poole has pointed out, little of Trubetskoi’s vision survived the cauldron of war on the Eastern front.6 Orthodoxy and patriotism once again came together in anti-Semitic diatribes. Jews were portrayed as a fifth column. Even those who (like Nikolai Berdiaev) condemned pogroms did so because they believed that mob violence discouraged a proper engagement with what Berdiaev termed the ‘negative’ features of Jewish religion and culture (p. 222). Inevitably some issues get short shrift. Readers looking for a close examination of peasant religion and peasant legal culture, as opposed to how these were understood by Slavophile commentators, will need to look elsewhere. Christine Worobec, Simon Dixon and Gregory Freeze have done a great deal to illuminate the complex world of rural ritual and practice, as well as the interaction between the peasantry and the state.7 In regard to peasant legal practices, Jane Burbank has demonstrated that peasants had active recourse to the township (volost) court, established in 1861, as a means of settling disputes with their neighbours over debts, damage to property, insults and so on. They valued the township court as a separate and exclusively peasant institution – it was their turf – but this by no means disconnected peasants from the world beyond the village. What it meant, according to Burbank, is that their imagination was ‘formed imperially’, in so far as the township court rested on the principle of soslovnost, or estate-ness. Peasants developed their own version of ‘legal consciousness’, but this meant keeping control of their own affairs rather than accepting the imposition of non-peasant authority, whether it derived from landlords, government officials or the professional intelligentsia. Elements of Burbank’s interpretation are compatible with the argument in Slavophile Empire, although Engelstein has little to say explicitly about the significance of these myriad group-defined rights and practices, because she is keen to focus closely on what she terms the ‘custodial state’ (p. 32).8 Many of the issues addressed by Engelstein are now receiving attention from other scholars as well. There is, for example, a compelling story being told about the emergence of a civil society, exemplified by Russian philosophical societies, co-operatives and other organizations. Some 10,000 such societies existed on the eve of the First World War. Although
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circumscribed by officialdom, these organizations secured themselves plenty of space for discussion and publication. There are investigations too into the role of Freemasonry in imperial Russia, as a means of debating in secret (and free from constraints imposed by the state and by ‘society’) the need and scope for government by virtuous men. As one historian of transnational civic associations has noted, ‘historians who do not look beyond a state’s legal restrictions on associations miss the phenomenon completely, just like the overworked state authorities did’.9 Among recent treatments of law, civil rights and the limits to citizenship in Russia, questions that are central to Slavophile Empire, Eric Lohr shows how the liberal jurist Vladimir Gessen (1868-1920) had a jaundiced view of the potential for rights in Russia, where the state relentlessly drove forward the obligations of the Tsar’s subjects. Writing at the turn of the century, Gessen hoped that citizenship could yet be founded on natural (or human) rights. Thus (as Lohr puts it), ‘the weak position of the individual in Russia intensified the search for the self and citizen outside the field of historically evolved Russian practices and institutions. In short, the weakness of the really existing Russian subject increased the impetus to focus on an ideal citizen grounded in universal principles’. But this idealism was difficult to sustain in a system that attached so much importance to clear legal distinctions founded on notions of estate (soslovie). This was an unresolved tension. During the First World War, liberals expected the state to extend rights to a population that was paying the price for mobilization and sacrifice. Leading military thinkers also maintained that the extension of citizenship (there was a question-mark over Russia’s Jewish population) would improve military effectiveness in a total war. When these expectations were dashed, liberals and generals made maximum political capital. They combined to unseat the Tsar in 1917.10 In relation to revolutionary violence, which is never far from the surface of Slavophile Empire, Daniel Beer has lately probed the ‘dark underbelly’ of democracy, the irrational mob behaviour which reformers unleashed and which showed signs of spreading like a ‘moral contagion’. Scientific knowledge and awareness contributed a good deal to specifying ‘problems’, but floundered when confronted with the problems created by collective human action and the spectre of an epidemic of unruly mass agitation. According to Beer, contemporaries attributed this pathology in part to backwardness, but they increasingly looked to crowd psychology for an explanation of unsettling phenomena such as mass suicide and cholera riots. Some argued that Russia’s backwardness was not to blame; rather there was a propensity for any crowd to exert a suggestive or hypnotic effect on its members, however cultivated or otherwise stable they might think themselves to be. One leading Russian psychologist, Petr Kapterev, spoke of the dangers lurking in liberalism: ‘[the spread of] culture undoubtedly brings about the physical and mental levelling down of people. Particular religions, specific forms of daily life, original worldviews, and separate
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languages – all this disappears under the pressure of the dominant unifying ideas, beliefs, customs, languages’. It behoved the professional intelligentsia to tread with great caution lest they unleash forces that could not be controlled. Much as one might lament Tsarist autocracy and Orthodoxy, so to say, or bemoan the constricting aspects of the land commune, these institutions at least had the merit of preventing such forces from sweeping all before them.11 In short, what Engelstein terms ‘Russia’s illiberal path’ emerged from several sources, and other scholars are encouraging us to look beyond a narrow conception of the authoritarian state in order to trace its connection to emerging doctrines and practices. One might also connect this strand of scholarship with debates about the forms of Russian imperial rule which do not rely on arguments about authoritarian tendencies (which tend to be Petersburg-centric) but rather take a decentralizing (‘federal’) perspective. Although not a central focus of Engelstein’s book, the ‘Slavophile empire’ engaged with ‘peripheral’ regions in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and recent historiography has begun to show how the extension of territorial control led members of the Russian intelligentsia to formulate critiques of established authority. Mark von Hagen has drawn attention to alternative visions for the rearrangement of political power, including the Decembrist (‘Northern Society’) plans in the 1820s for a federal empire. Later in the nineteenth century, powerful critiques of autocracy emerged not in St Petersburg but in such places as Ukraine, Siberia and the Volga provinces where an alternative political course was being contemplated. In these regions the voices of ancient Novgorod and of Cossack warriors, both of them affirming an autonomous (and in the case of Cossacks, their prized soslovnost’) past, were part of the chorus. The Siberian regionalist Afanasii Shchapov (1830-1876) added that the sectarians and schismatics represented the best of the various movements that had the potential to counter Muscovite absolutism by means of decentralized and democratic government. This debate continued after the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. This is not a plea for more ‘regional’ history, rather a call for studies that situate the region in its imperial, comparative and international context, something that is only obliquely alluded to by Engelstein.12 Engelstein writes (p. 89) that ‘an issue key to the relation of state and society concerned the laws governing religion’. Mention has already been made of the challenge that sectarianism posed to the state and the privileged position occupied by the Orthodox Church. She discusses at some length reformist projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to loosen the grip of the Church. At the same time, her treatment of religion almost entirely overlooks other faiths, with the exception of Judaism. Readers might wish to tap the rich vein of scholarship on the encounters between Orthodox Russians and the Tsar’s non-Christian subjects, which
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were at least as challenging for the prospect of imperial stability as the issue of Orthodoxy’s monopoly in the Russian core.13 Lastly, readers who wish to explore other elements of Slavophile and neo-Slavophile thought should head straight to a marvellous study of the nineteenth-century Russian merchant and polymath Fedor Chizhov, who combined a ferocious work ethic (he amassed a very large fortune and found time to write a diary running to 4,000 pages) with a mystical sense of the ‘bond’ between the Russian people that survived political turbulence. Chizhov (who is introduced on pp. 159-61 as an ‘amateur art critic’) was the archetypal embodiment of Slavophile capitalism, with its emphasis on the need to sustain a domestic industry in the face of foreign penetration of the Russian market.14 An even more neglected figure (and a far less prepossessing individual) not mentioned by Engelstein, is Sergei Sharapov (1855-1911), who detected positive elements in the pre-reform economy that testified to a close bond between peasants and landlords and who idealized the ‘family’ of producers in which the landlord played the role of teacher. Sharapov tried to enlist other neo-Slavophile intellectuals on behalf of his critique of government economic policy in the 1890s and 1900s – he was an arch critic of the modernizing Minister of Finances Sergei Witte as well as Petr Stolypin, whose attempts to undermine communal farming would, he felt, have disastrous consequences for the stability of rural society. By no means all neo-Slavophiles were opposed to industry; some, such as N. A. Aksakov, maintained that Moscow businessmen operated as paternalistic employers, an argument consistent with what Engelstein tells us about the enduring appeal of Russian exceptionalism. There was, Aksakov and Sharapov maintained, a world of difference between their principles and those of foreign entrepreneurs. Sharapov became fixated with the possibility of developing cottage industry in Russia, making use of new sources of mechanical power. In 1902 he published a short book in which he anticipated a utopia fifty years hence that would encourage a revival of the parish based around ‘people’s credit’ and a mystical concept of ‘people’s money’ that would be underwritten by a ‘bond of trust’ between Tsar and people.15 Slavophile Empire reminds us that Laura Engelstein has contributed greatly to rethinking Russia’s pre-revolutionary cultural and intellectual history. Set alongside the rich body of work mentioned above, including work that allows us to track the impact of Tsarist rule and Slavophile doctrine on Russia’s multinational empire, her book forms an indispensable contribution to the historiography. Peter Gatrell (
[email protected]) is Professor of Economic History at the University of Manchester. His books include A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (Bloomington, 1999) and Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956-1963
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(Cambridge, 2011). He is currently writing a book entitled The Making of the Modern Refugee.
NOTES AND REFERENCES 1 From a very large literature in English, I would single out Tim McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea, Princeton, 1996, and Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy: History of a Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought, Oxford, 1975. 2 Reginald Zelnik, Law and Disorder on the Narova River: the Kreenholm Strike of 1872, Berkeley, 1995. See also the important volume Between Tsar and People: Educated Society and the Quest for Public Identity in Late Imperial Russia, ed. Edith W. Clowes, S. D. Kassow and J. L. West, Princeton, 1991. 3 Civil Rights in Imperial Russia, ed. Olga Crisp and Linda Edmondson, Oxford, 1989. 4 Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Sie`cle Russia, Ithaca, 1992; Landmarks, ed. Judith Zimmermann, London, 1994. 5 Nicholas Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus, Ithaca, 2005. 6 Randall A. Poole, ‘Religion, War, and Revolution: E. N. Trubetskoi’s Liberal Construction of Russian National Identity, 1912-20’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7: 2, 2006. 7 Christine Worobec, Possessed: Women, Witches, and Demons in Imperial Russia, DeKalb, 2001; Simon Dixon, ‘Superstition in Imperial Russia’, Past and Present, Supp. 3, August 2008; Gregory Freeze, ‘Subversive Piety: Religion and the Political Crisis in Late Imperial Russia’, Journal of Modern History 68: 2, 1996. See also Paul W. Werth, ‘Toward ‘‘Freedom of Conscience’’: Catholicism, Law, and the Contours of Religious Liberty in Late Imperial Russia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7: 4, 2006. 8 Jane Burbank, ‘Thinking like an Empire: Estate, Law and Rights in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, ed. Jane Burbank, Mark von Hagen and Anatoly Remnev, Bloomington, 2007, p. 211. See also Jane Burbank, ‘An Imperial Rights Regime: Law and Citizenship in the Russian Empire’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7: 3, 2006. 9 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Democracy and Associations in the Long Nineteenth Century: Toward a Transnational Perspective’, Journal of Modern History 75: 2, 2003, p. 288. See also Douglas Smith, Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia, DeKalb, 1999; Yanni Kotsonis, Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperatives and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861-1914, Basingstoke, 1999; Joseph C. Bradley, Voluntary Associations in Tsarist Russia: Science, Patriotism and Civil Society, Cambridge MA, 2009. 10 Eric Lohr, ‘The Ideal Citizen and Real Subject in Late Imperial Russia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7: 2, 2006. See also Valerie Kivelson, ‘Muscovite ‘‘Citizenship’’: Rights without Freedom’, Journal of Modern History 74: 3, 2002; Gregory Freeze, ‘The soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History’, American Historical Review 91: 1, 1986; Yanni Kotsonis, ‘ ‘‘No Place to Go’’: Taxation and State Transformation in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia’, Journal of Modern History 76: 3, 2004. 11 Daniel Beer, ‘Microbes of the Mind’: Moral Contagion in Late Imperial Russia’, Journal of Modern History 79: 3, 2007. 12 Mark von Hagen, ‘Federalisms and Pan-Movements: Re-imagining Empire’, in Russian Empire, ed. Burbank and others; Alexei Miller, The Romanov Empire and Nationalism: Essays in the Methodology of Historical Research, Budapest, 2008. 13 Paul Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Missions, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827-1905, Ithaca, 2000; Robert P. Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia, Ithaca, 2001; Elena Campbell, ‘The Muslim Question in Late Imperial Russia’, in Russian Empire, ed. Burbank and others; Paul W. Werth, ‘From Resistance to Subversion: Imperial Power, Indigenous Opposition, and their Entanglement’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1: 1, 2000; Robert Crews, ‘Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia’, American Historical Review 108: 1, 2003.
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14 Thomas Owen, Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age, Cambridge MA, 2008. 15 Mikhail Suslov, ‘ ‘‘Slavophilism is True Liberalism’’: the Political Utopia of S. F. Sharapov’, Russian History 38: 2, 2011.
doi:10.1093/hwj/dbr044 Advance Access Publication 23 August 2011
Pen-Keeping by Bertie Mandelblatt Verene A. Shepherd, Livestock, Sugar and Slavery: Contested Terrain in Colonial Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2009; 279 pp; 978-976-637-256-9 (pbk) 978-976-637-403-7.
For several decades scholars in history, anthropology, development studies, and literary and cultural studies have argued forcefully for the links between Caribbean history and the global transformations that underlie modernity. In the pages of this journal, for example, David Scott has recently examined the career of cultural anthropologist Sidney Mintz, which for over five decades has been devoted to illuminating the vast global implications of the implantation of European colonies in the Caribbean and of the institutionalization of transatlantic slavery, which was responsible for the continued economic viability of these colonies between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries.1 Drawing on the seminal works of Eric Williams and C.L.R. James, Hilary Beckles has also interrogated the place of the Caribbean within discourses of modernity, showing how ‘the Caribbean was not only at the heart of the ‘‘West’’ but . . . the ‘‘West’’ was invented in the Caribbean’.2 Central amongst the developments launched in the Caribbean during these centuries – a period which revolutionized how the ‘West’ (the ‘North Atlantic’. as Michel-Rolph Trouillot has identified it, in this regard)3 functioned and defined itself – was the growth of an industrial capitalism rooted in plantation slavery. And consequently the focus of many historians and of other scholars of Caribbean slavery and early modern capitalism has been on the emergence of the plantation system, and its economic and demographic effects. However, the very enormity of the plantation system’s impact on commodity production, on Caribbean society and on the development of transatlantic economies paradoxically has led to a flattening
