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Key Terms:
Quotidian plantation relations (p.3), Boundaries of Power (p.5), Geographies of Containment (p.6), Rival Geography, Third Bodies (p.10), Principles of Restraint, (p.13), Slave Patrols (p.25), Absentees, (p.35), Enslaved Healers (p.46), Collective Action (p.49)
Key Quotes:
“Space mattered; places, boundaries, and movement were central to how slavery was organized and to how it was resisted,” (p.6).
“No moment in the life of the world is ever static, but if words such as “revolution” and “transformation” mean anything, they imply that change is faster and more profound in certain times than in others.” (p.9).
“Revolutionary moments may make spectacular breaks with the past, but they also are formed by them, spilling over from the old constraints and making the most of the new opportunities to do visibly what formally had been cloaked,” (p.10).
“Duty, affection, and conceptions of black womanhood tightened and complicated women’s attachments to the South,” (p.37).
“Many people in enslaved communities recognized absenteeism… as social protest in which many bonds people participated collectively for political and personal reasons,” (p.51).
higbeejonathan identifies Camp’s key slave resistance argument, I can agree him that Camp’s reinvents the idea of how resistance is illustrated by pointing to the obvious historical events of Nat’s Rebellion and the Underground Railroad (brillant). Camp appeals to interdisciplinary fields with statistics, legal and economic facts to create historical foundations and credibility. Refreshing the way to introduce data-driven fields into the cultural, environmental history fields. Utilizing slave hymns, diaries, journals, newspapers and statistical data she furthers her argument by effortless combining these elements to explain harder to digest epistemologies transitions of patriarchy to paternalism in the plantation south.
She has clearly done her homework of her fellow field scholars by emphasizing how technologies for punishment and work along with left-handed resistance, from Baptist, becomes useful asserting planter geographic containments for bonds people. Explaining how planters often methodologically planned their estates, like careful gardeners tending to God’s land, while utilizing paternalistic values of working the grounds with the bare hands of others (page 5). Reminding me of Doug Sackman’s Orange Empire. He asserts that citrus tycoons of the West dominated their lands by honoring the founding fathers who toiled soil to grow better opportunities. When opportunities required managed hands, they acted in a paternalistic manner to feel they were directly contributing directly to the land in a master/worker relationship (Often as God would mold his children). Her digestible version of Gould’s legal laws on geographic containments illustrates that legal history can be incorporated (in not such a dry way, sorry Gould).
Further, I view early developments of commerce and capitalism ideologies from the Beckert/Rockman book, drawing from ideas that presented in the ‘age of improvement’ argument (p.20). Industrialism influences plantation ideology juxtaposed Beckert/Rockman’s argument and slavery is the nucleus to all economy traded markets within this time frame. This argument is very thought-provoking as an idea of inverted influence as we often see how the cotton industry changed and propelled capitalism in 19th century America. The cherry on top of Camp’s argument is she points to “familiar framework, the young colony showed its Caribbean roots,” (p15), by commodifying people, but doing ‘one-up’ by adding temporal and spatial contours and boundaries for bondspeople’s lives and selling it as paternalism when the slave trade exploded from “700,000 in 1790 to almost 1.2 million just twenty years later,” (p.18). I also find it incredible work to illustrate how women were often truants as it was utilized as their getaway due to their mental, emotional and physical desires to support their fellow bondsmen. Further, I find it very smart to overcome this challenge of absenteeism, paternalist planter’s utilized bondsmen to control and assert dominate power of fleeing bondswomen in this gender-driven society and ideology of ‘black womanhood’ in its infancy stages(37).
This idea leaves me to my one question connecting Camp’s Argument of spatial and geographic influences to Gould’s argument of ‘borrowing’ from British international affairs to create our American government. If both Camp and Gould argue that our global neighbors were great influences on our American government and our capitalistic economy, would a larger geographic space between the Caribbean and Southern states affect planter slavery epistemologies? We can all agree that British outlawed slavery before the United States did, but was this influenced partially by their geographic gap between the slave commodity of the Caribbean?
It is truly awe-inspiring a little book could have such powerful influence and forever effect the feminist historical studies. Drew Faust, the author of This Republic of Suffering, was just as inspired and it is truly tragic that someone this brilliant was taken from our field too soon.
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