Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
Genre
History
Format
Paperback
Dimensions
9.00 (w) x 6.00 (h) x 0.42 (d)
Pages
184
Publisher
LSU Press
Publication Date
June 1996
ISBN
9780807120835
Book ISBN 10
0807120839
About Book
First published in 1971, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's comparison of two developing sugar plantation systems - St. Domingue's (Haiti) in the eighteenth century and Cuba's in the nineteenth century - changed the focus in comparative slavery studies: the prevailing static treatment, which assumed that the European colonizer determined the nature of slave systems and that slaves were powerless and insignificant beneficiaries of the paternalism of Latin American masters, gave way to a dynamic, multifaceted approach employed by Hall. In Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies, Hall establishes that slavery and race relations in any given time and place were determined by strategic needs; the raison d'etre of the colony; evolving economic and demographic factors; and above all, by the need to preserve social order in colonies where the slave population was large, active, competent, resourceful, and independent-minded. She delineates a pattern of racism rising and entrenching itself as a matter of public policy, as a means of bolstering the exploitative system - a pattern that recurred throughout the hemisphere.
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