Testing Ground of Freedom

In the aftermath of slave emancipation, disputes over children and their labor hinged on determining the boundary between free and unfree labor. Juxtaposing Reconstruction-era battles over formerly enslaved children in the South—especially the actions of the Freedmen’s Bureau—with simultaneous battles occurring over child laborers in the North such as Italian padrone children, the second chapter reveals that free labor principles were the primary means of resolving such disputes in both the North and South. As the market expanded nationally, post-Civil War debates about children and their labor reinforced free labor ideology in both regions and helped to clarify the distinction between free and unfree labor.

Black Republican

During the economic crisis of the 1850s and early 1860s that made northerners’ individual and household independence seem more precarious, men like Thomas Webster gave voice to their ideology and tried to protect their interest. In doing so, they embraced both caution and speculation not only to end slaveholders’ grip on the nation’s political economy but also to benefit from slave emancipation. Their cautious hedges proved risky, and led to profound soul-searching in political and cultural debates among northern devotees of free labor. By 1860, the financial uncertainty borne of the Panic of 1857 and the secession crisis forced Webster to look for patronage from Republican allies to access a new capital stream. It was through the work of middlemen like Webster—as much as through the efforts of abolitionists, Republican politicians, Union soldiers, and enslaved people—that slavery ended and free labor’s promise for workers was unmade during the Civil War Era. Webster represented the speculative—many said the fraudulent—impulses and activities in an economy founded on the fact that having capital meant having power. That capital would make these northerners more independent in a competitive market, and their speculations would shape the contours of war and emancipation.

Outside Options, Coercion, and Wages: Removing the Sugar Coating

In economies with a large informal sector firms can increase profits by reducing workers’ outside options in that informal sector. We formalise this idea in a simple model of an agricultural economy with plantation owners who lobby the government to enact coercive policies—e.g., the eviction and incarceration of squatting smallhold farmers—that reduce the value to working outside the formal sector. Using unique data for 14 British West Indies ‘sugar islands’ from 1838 (the year of slave emancipation) until 1913, we examine the impact of plantation owners’ power on wages and coercion-related incarceration. To gain identification, we utilise exogenous variation in the strength of the plantation system in the different islands over time. Where planter power declined we see that incarceration rates dropped, and agricultural wages rose, accompanied by a decline in formal agricultural employment.

Antinomian Intimacy in Claude McKay’s Jamaica

Chapter 4 turns to Jamaican-born Claude McKay’s Jamaica-based poetry in Constab Ballads (1911) and fiction in Banana Bottom (1933). Recent scholarship has positioned McKay as an exemplary black diasporic queer, focusing largely on his U.S.-based Home to Harlem (1928) and the France-based Banjo (1929). In contrast, McKay’s Jamaica-based work has been neglected, suggesting that it is inadequately diasporic, inadequately queer, or both. Jamaica as “home” is rendered normative by its absence from discussions of McKay’s queer aesthetics and politics. I turn to Jamaican slave, emancipation, and post-emancipation histories to frame McKay’s poetry and fiction. In doing so, I demonstrate that McKay derives his models of gender and sexuality from Jamaican histories of labor and punishment. Under slavery, men and women performed the same work and received the same punishments, and thus were similarly (un)gendered, a process that extended the logics and practices of thingification generated by enslavement and commodification. Following emancipation in 1832, the colonial government attempted to distinguish men from women by how it treated work and punishment: thus, as I illustrate, queer Jamaican history is not predicated on same-sex eroticism, but in the range of embodied practices and desires made legible and illegible through slave and emancipation histories. In Constab Ballads and Banana Bottom, McKay depicts not only a range of erotic diversities, but, more importantly, a range of epistemological frames for understanding those diversities that depart from colonial modernity’s pathologizing logics. McKay goes where Fanon does not know how to, by demonstrating the place of erotic freedom within black diasporic struggles.