Dialect Anthropol (2012) 36:245–262

DOI 10.1007/s10624-012-9287-5

OBITUARY

Eugene Genovese and a dialectical anthropology

George Baca

 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2012

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the few genuinely great historians of our century. He
is also the one genuinely great historian to come out of the Anglo-American
Marxist left. I admit to my prejudice. He has been the strongest influence on
my own work as a historian, and in 1979 I dedicated a book on black slave
revolts to ‘‘Eric Hobsbawm: Our Main Man.’’ I have made a great many
mistakes in my life, but reading and rereading Hobsbawm’s powerful new
book I am relieved to see that I got at least that much right. Eugene Genovese
(1995: 43).

Over the past two decades historian Eugene Genovese has been an object of scorn,
even hatred, by ‘‘the Left.’’ Meanwhile various right wing and conservative figures
have embraced him and he developed a number of friendships and alliances that
seemed to undermine his long and unflinching career as a radical scholar. I will
confess, the perception of two Eugene Genoveses—the radical historian gifted with
great analytic powers and the rightwing ideologue—has been puzzling. In 1993 I
discovered Genoveses prodigious critical powers in his classic Roll, Jordan, Roll:
The World the Slaves Made. I was in awe of the way he rejected the simple
moralism inherent in liberal assessments of slavery by drawing an authoritative
picture, bewildering in all its contradictory details, of the manner in which slaves
and their owners created a society. I navigated my way through Genovese’s corpus
largely unguided, which left me oblivious of his now legendary shift to ‘‘the Right’’
(see Genovese 1994). To say the least, my enthusiasm for Genovese went over like a
lead balloon as I began to traverse my way through the political landmines of
academia. My admiration for Genovese’s intellectual powers met hushes, awkward

G. Baca (&)
College of International Studies, Dong-A University, International Studies B5-0256,
225 Gudeok-ro, Seo-Gu, Busan 602-760, Korea
e-mail: baca.george@gmail.com

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silences, raised eyebrows, and the occasional didactic lecture to disabuse me of my

ignorance. Over the past twenty years I have continued to pay attention to
Genovese’s work—while ignoring much of his incendiary political rhetoric—and
believe that he offers many insights necessary for a dialectical approach to
anthropology. Any scholar interested in understanding contemporary global
capitalism and changing forms of nationalism and racism, will ignore Eugene
Genovese’s work at her own peril.
The excerpt above, from a generous yet sharp review of Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of
Extremes (1995), may help reframe our recollections of Genovese. Even in his much
maligned reincarnation as a conservative he retained an abiding interest in
understanding capitalism. Moreover he remained influenced by Marxism and even
claimed Eric Hobsbawm as his greatest inspiration. Yet Genovese distinguished
himself with the uncanny ability to combine careful synchronic analyses and
systematic theorizations with the type of sweeping historical narratives of global
capital and empire that was the hallmark of Hobsbawm; and he continued to yield
relevant insights about the ways the American South has developed from a
dialectical relationship with global capitalism (see Fox-Genovese and Genovese
1983, 2005, 2008).
Genovese’s methods for connecting local studies with global phenomena are
relevant to contemporary anthropology. Especially in light of the ascendance of
concepts like ‘‘globalization’’ and ‘‘transnationalism,’’ which have left many
anthropologists grasping for new methods to scrutinize what is perceived to be the
novelty of ‘‘global flows’’ (see Mintz 1998; Trouillot 2003). In this context
Genovese offers a useful model of history; a painstakingly dialectical methodology
that aggressively breaks down the mechanistic binaries and oppositions from which
the road to hell is paved with Manichaean characters representing good and evil.
Genovese was never interested in telling comforting stories as the title of his latest
monograph—Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South
(Genovese and Fox-Genovese 2011)—attests. Instead of feel-good and uplifting
narratives, he told complex stories that highlighted, in Marxian fashion, the radical
ways in which capitalism restructures social relations; a process that is characterized
by a complex mix of coercion, resistance, accommodation, and reform that
illustrates the historical nature of cultural forces.
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Genovese made an indelible mark—
drawing, it seems, equal parts of praise and criticism—with the rapid-fire
publication of four classic texts: The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), The
World the Slaveholders Made (1969), In Red and Black (1971), and finally Roll,
Jordan, Roll (1974). Armed with a sophisticated understanding of Marxist theory he
made a valiant effort to reorient the discipline of American history. At the time, the
study of slavery in the United States was mired in parochial notions of American
Exceptionalism that presumed slavery was an aberration to the United States’ core
ideals, a nation that was ultimately viewed as having, through godly ordinance, the
mission to spread liberty and democracy. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s concept of
cultural hegemony (see Genovese 1967), he found within pro-slavery ideology an
antagonism to the market-based bourgeois society of the antebellum North. In the
end, he showed that the southern planters constituted a forceful opposition to the

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expansion of modern capitalist social relations (Lichtenstein 1997). Yet it produced

a class hegemony through paternalism—a process that bound planters and slaves
into fraught yet tight social relationships, which he chillingly described in the
opening passage of Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made:
Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples together in
bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and
ambivalent that neither could express the simplest feelings without reference
to the other…. By definition and in essence it was a system of class rule, in
which some people lived off the labor of others. American slavery
subordinated one race to another and thereby rendered its fundamental class
relationships more complex and ambiguous; but they remained class
relationships. The racism that developed from racial subordination influenced
every aspect of American life and remains powerful. But slavery as a system
of class rule predated racism and racial subordination in world history and
once existed without them (Genovese 1974: 3–4).
By the mid-1970s Stanley Diamond had launched Dialectical Anthropology and
Genovese’s studies of American slavery were in conversation with, and grew
alongside, the newly developing approach in anthropology known as ‘‘culture and
political economy.’’ With this emergent approach Genovese shared what William
Roseberry defined as a cultural-historical methodology that offered an alternative to
the World Systems theories’ tendency to subsume local histories into global
processes (for this type of critique of World Systems see Mintz 1977 and Genovese
1975: p. 75). To be sure, Genovese contributed an innovative methodology that
grasped ‘‘the formation of anthropological subjects (‘‘real people doing real things’’)
at the intersections of local interactions… and the larger processes of state and
empire making’’ (Roseberry 1988: 163, italics original).
With the recent passing of Eugene Genovese, it is a good time to reflect on his
approach to studying culture and history by revisiting an article he published in the
first volume of Dialectical Anthropology entitled ‘‘Class, Culture, and Historical
Process.’’ This rather bland title belies the engaging and critical examination of
Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean Transformations. In this volume, Mintz synthesized
some of his most important studies of Caribbean societies. Over the past four
decades, Caribbean Transformations has become a classic text. What distinguishes
the volume is that it displays Mintz’s unique ability to speak authoritatively about
Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone societies in the region. Rather than
being a rehashing of previous arguments, he pulled these studies together in order to
make a comprehensive and vigorous argument for the Caribbean as a cultural region
that emerged from a plantation economy under regimes of slavery.
Genovese’s evaluation of Caribbean Transformations begins with his sophisti-
cated concept of culture, which he argues is necessary for understanding the ways in
which the historical transformation of relations between the European metro-pole
and Caribbean colonies have shaped the extenuating problems ‘‘facing those who
would lead these or other new nations out of poverty, disunity, and colonial
exploitation’’ (Genovese 1975: p. 75). Genovese insists that the careful description
of cultural life of oppressed people—whether it is ethnography or social history—is

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relevant for understanding large questions about the development of capitalism and
systems of domination. Moreover he stresses the strength of Mintz’s ethnographic
view lay in that ‘‘Nothing is irrelevant. The ways in which slaves, and later
freedmen, cooked their food, reinterpreted received religious doctrines, organized a
division of labor in the home, sang songs, worked hard or shirked—the ways, big
and small, they shaped their own lives—provided them with reference points of
their own’’ (Genovese 1975: p. 73).
Amid his praise for Mintz’s fieldwork and ‘‘analytic performance,’’ Genovese
begins to reveal his disagreements on the level of conceptualization. In contrast to
Mintz, Genovese fancied himself as a theorist and put great efforts into
conceptualizing the ideological structures of American slavery. His approach has
certainly yielded impressive insights in his formulation of ‘‘paternalism.’’ Unlike the
way in which contemporary anthropologists often dismiss the ideas of neoliberals as
a charade, he took paternalism as a central organizing theme of southern society,
which could not be dismissed as a smokescreen that merely glossed over
exploitation. Instead he illustrated that it was expressed as an ‘‘authentic expression
of class rule, rather than as a hypocritical pretense designed to paper over naked
human exploitation and greed’’ (Lichtenstein 1997). Genovese makes no bones that
the central idea of slavery, from the perspective of the master, ‘‘was the absolute
submission of the slave’’ whereby the slave represented the extension of the
‘‘master’s will’’ (Genovese 1975: p. 72). It is in relationship to reigning ideologies
of power that he credits Mintz with bringing to life the manner in which oppressed
peoples are agents of history (Genovese 1975: p. 72).
In the case of slaves and their descendants, these cultural forms of resistance
surely had some African antecedents, but these were not African per se. Instead they
were shaped by their integration into large scale, often proto-industrial, plantations
with a meticulous division of labor. In the process, slaves ‘‘drew on Europe, the
colonial setting, and above all the immediate plantation community’’ in a process
that Genovese brilliantly describes as ‘‘ruthlessly’’ appropriating ‘‘everything they
needed and could use. The world view they fashioned in consequence allowed them to
meet the demands of the economics and social system without fully becoming its
creatures. That the system took a heavy toll, culturally as well as physically, is beyond
doubt. But it could not produce the robots it wanted’’ (Genovese 1975: p. 73). In this way
Genovese’s depiction of New World civilization simultaneously captures the tragedy of
enslavement while demonstrating that slaves were actors who fashioned a world view of
their own at the same time they were tragically subordinated to a ruthless regime of class
power.
At the end of the essay Genovese fully reveals his disappointment with Caribbean
Transformations when he asserts the ‘‘main difficulty with Mintz’s brilliant work on
the relationship of class and culture lies in his skirting of the problem of hegemony’’
(Genovese 1975: p. 77). He adds irony when he points out the flaw in analysis ‘‘appears
most clearly in midst of one of his finest analytical performances’’ in describing
‘‘effectively the complexities of accommodation and resistance and rebuts the rigid
mechanistic formulations that have marked the recent debate on the ‘slave
personality.’’’ Genovese provides a long quotation that simultaneously represents
Mintz’s ‘‘excellent discussion’’ and ‘‘a certain mechanistic quality of its own’’:

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But there was also accommodation, submission, degradation, and self-hatred.

Moreover, it is clear that some of the most effective forms of resistance were
built upon prior adaptation, involving the slaves in processes of culture
change and retention of a complicated kind. To write off all adaptive
mechanisms as a loss of will to resist is tantamount to the denial of creative
energies to the slaves themselves…. Was the readiness of Jamaican slaves to
grow their own foodstuffs on plantation uplands to be written off as
‘‘nonresistance?’’ Through such activities, the slaves acquired skills in
cultivation and marketing that greatly increased their ability to escape
plantation labor after emancipation; traveled freely to the market-places,
where they learned much of value (some of which may have been essential in
fomenting rebellion); demonstrated to observant visitors their capacity to
function independently and intelligently; and acquired liquid capital for
various purposes. Yet no one would call subsistence cultivation and marketing
mechanisms of ‘‘resistance,’’ for the very good reason that they were not
resistance as such, but forms of accommodation. At the same time, suicide—
since it deprived masters of their labor—is correctly labeled ‘‘resistance,’’
even though, once dead, one does precious little resisting (Mintz 1974: 76).
In this passage, Genovese argues, Mintz poses a ‘‘brittle dichotomy’’ between
‘‘resistance and accommodation’’ that ultimately ‘‘does violence to the dialectical
character of the specific analysis’’ (Genovese 1975: p. 78). And this problem, Genovese
insists, stems from ‘‘Mintz’s attempt to bypass the problems posed by the ideological
character of the slave regime considered as a whole’’ (Genovese 1975: p. 78).
Genovese’s critique of Mintz in term of ideology and hegemony is not surprising.
Certainly these two concepts are the hallmarks of his early work. Clearly this
objection to Mintz stems from his reading of Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural
hegemony. It is important to point out that Genovese was one of the first North
American scholars to engage Gramsci. Dare I say he preceded, by more than two
decades, the mainstream of anthropology’s enthusiastic embrace of ‘‘hegemony.’’
Genovese sees the concept of hegemony as the tool that can restore the dialectical
character of social life to Mintz’s analysis. In this way, he brings everyday life of
oppression into an exploration of social change and historical process whereby the
ruling classes, and the various factions within, are in a continuous struggle, or what
Gramsci calls a ‘‘war of maneuver’’ that dispenses with any type of a binary
opposition between resistance and accommodation (Gramsci 1971). Through intra-
class struggles and the framing of what is acceptable we see the creation of a
‘‘common sense’’ (in the Gramscian sense) which permeates the fabric of New
World plantation-based societies. Clearly not everyone is affected the same way
given their material realities and how groups are in structured hierarchy with one
another, but nonetheless it does affect all—masters, slaves, and everyone else alike.
It clarifies the limits of power and understands the way in which these dominant
views are constantly resisted and challenged in ways that modify and shape the
structures of power and economy:
There are, after all, profound differences between the culture of Brooklyn
dock workers and that of Wall Street bankers; there may be even greater

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differences between the culture of Jamaican peasants and that of the Kingston
elite. Yet ruling classes, when they are not in their death throes and relying on
naked force, rule by mediating these differences within the context of a
hegemonic ideology—‘hegemonic’ because it compels the lower classes to
define themselves within the ruling system even while resisting its aggression
with enormous courage and resourcefulness’’ (Genovese 1975: p. 77).
Genovese’s interpretation of cultural hegemony was part of a political vision for a
radical politics, which he shared, for a short time, with many of the anthropologists
who helped establish Dialectical Anthropology in 1975. Genovese proved to be a
respected interlocutor and his contributions to radical scholarship landed him on the
original editorial board of Dialectical Anthropology. In establishing the journal,
Stanley Diamond expressed an optimism about the reemergence of a critical
scholarship through which the ‘‘impulse of the sixties had survived the generation
that created them; they have found more serious, focused, and more deeply political
(that is, Marxist) expression’’ (Diamond 1979). By the 1980s such confidence had
dissipated and Genovese was tacking to the right. This leads me to reflect on the fact
that during the 1960s Genovese was already talking about issues of global capital and
the inherent struggles against market ideology long before—and better—than many
people do today. However, he became rightfully despondent about the type of
conversations that were emerging and one has to think that if alliances had been
fortified within anthropology, Genovese might not have been captivated by a
rightward political position. That is to say, his railing against the identity politics,
however wrong he may have been, partly stemmed from the fact that American
anthropology followed a detour away from the path of rigorous analysis that he had
sketched. And so the negative reactions to my insistence on reading and using
Genovese are indicative of what he was railing about—even if the specifics of his
diatribes (and its extremes) may have been quite mistaken. It’s impossible to say
whether this would have affected Genovese’s slide to the right. However, if
anthropology had paid more careful attention to this research agenda, history could
have been different. Whatever Genovese’s faults were, we must be equally critical of
the path that the discipline of anthropology has taken.

References

Diamond, Stanley (ed.). 1979. Toward a Marxist Anthropology: Problems and Perspectives. The Hague:
Mouton Publishers.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. 1983. Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and
Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. 2005. The Mind of the Masterclass: History and Faith
in the Southern Slaveholder’s Worldview. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, and Eugene Genovese. 2008. Slavery in White and Black: Class and Race in
the Southern Slaveholders’ New World Order. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Genovese, Eugene. 1965. The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and the Society of
the Slave South. New York: Vintage.
Genovese, Eugene. 1967. On Antonio Gramsci. Studies on the Left 7(1–2): 83–107.

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Genovese, Eugene. 1969. The World the Slaveholders Made. New York: Vintage.
Genovese, Eugene. 1971. In Red and Black: Marxian explorations in Southern and Afro-American
history. New York: Pantheon Books.
Genovese, Eugene. 1974. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Vintage.
Genovese, Eugene. 1975. Class, culture and historical process. 1(1–4): 71–79. doi:10.1007/BF00244570
Genovese, Eugene. 1994. The question. Dissent 41(3): 371–376.
Genovese, Eugene. 1995. The squandered century: A Review of Ages of Extremes. The New Republic
volume 212: 38–43.
Genovese, Eugene, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. 2011. Fatal Self-Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism
in the Old South. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers.
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1995. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. New York: Pantheon
Books.
Lichtenstein, Alex. 1997. ‘‘Right Church, Wrong Pew: Eugene Genovese & Southern Conservatism.’’
New Politics, 6 (3) http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue23/lichte23.htm.
Mintz, Sidney. 1974. Caribbean Transformations. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton.
Mintz, Sidney. 1977. The so-called world system: Local initiative and local response. Dialectical
Anthropology 2(4): 253–270.
Mintz, Sidney. 1998. Localization of anthropological practice: From area studies to transnationalism.
Critique of Anthropology 18(2): 117–133.
Roseberry, William. 1988. Political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 17: 161–185.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New
York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Class, Culture, and Historical Process

Eugene Genovese

Caribbean Transformations1 brings together Sidney W. Mintz’s most important

studies of the Afro-American experience and of such related subjects as the
development of the plantation system, the emergence of post-emancipation
peasantries, and the social basis of nationhood.1 Anthropologists and other
Caribbean specialists, who have long appreciated the high quality of Mint_z’s field
work, research, and analytical performance, will welcome a volume that
conveniently presents these previously published papers together with much new
material. They should take additional satisfaction in Mintz’s decision to revise his
earlier work so as to shape these papers into a coherent interpretation of Caribbean
social history. Even those who know Mintz’s work well will find this book fresh.
To Mintz’s great credit, Caribbean Transformations deserves careful criticism
from a wide range of perspectives, for it makes important contributions to cultural
and economic anthropology, to the political and economic history of the Caribbean,
to the development of a social history of oppressed classes, to an understanding of
the roots of racism, and to the theory of capitalist development. Consideration of
1
Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, Inc., 1974).
Eugene Genovese is Chairman of the Department of History at the University of Rochester, New York.

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these contributions, especially to anthropology and Caribbean studies, may best be

left to specialists. As a historian with no claims to being a Caribbean specialist, I
wish to limit myself to some of the implications for the Marxist interpretation of
history—an interpretation that has clearly influenced Mintz’s thought and helped
shape his formulation of major problems.
Taken as a whole, Caribbean Transformations does much more than explore the
origins and development of Afro-Caribbean culture; it provides an original vantage
point for the study of Caribbean political economy and of the problems facing those who
would lead these or other new nations out of poverty, disunity, and colonial
exploitation.2 As such, it should provide all the answers anyone needs to refute those
who pursue the cult of ‘‘relevance.’’ What could be less relevant than to dally over the
different ways in which Caribbean peoples cook their food or organize their yards and
gardens? Yet, as Mintz demonstrates, the problem is not that cooking has no relevance
for politics—we have good reason to know that it does—but that we cannot as yet
establish the chains of connection within the patterns we are struggling to identify.
The way a people cooks its food and the kinds of food it cooks reveal a good deal
about its spirit and—to invoke the word that conjures up vast mystical properties
these days—its ‘‘consciousness.’’ For example, slaves in the United States had
ostensibly been whipped into sulleness, dispiritedness, and even infantilization; yet
we know that they took great pride in their cooking. They carefully handed down
recipes from mother (and father) to daughter (and son) and quietly assumed that
blacks were naturally superior to whites in culinary matters, and indeed in much else.
Cooking, like many other seemingly trivial activities, became a politically safe way
for a downtrodden people to remind themselves and others with eyes to see that,
however badly mauled, they were keeping themselves alive to fight another day.
Among American scholars, no one has displayed a deeper sense than Mintz of the
political implications of an oppressed people’s culture. From a general appreciation
of cultural manifestations as proto-politics—as ‘‘resistance’’—he has carried his
analyses to higher levels in order to establish the most specific linkages he can
discern, consistent with responsible scholarship. He has delineated those linkages he
regards as almost certain, those he regards as probable, and those he regards as
merely possible. Thereby he has established the foundation for further work that
may, as he well knows, overturn some of his favorite hypotheses. He has forcefully
demonstrated that the history, economy, and politics of the Caribbean—not to
mention the prospects for revolutionary social and national transformation—cannot
intelligently be pursued outside a cultural context.
For Mintz, culture is ever changing. In one of its decisive aspects, it serves
oppressed people as a strategy for survival through the organization of daily life. As
such, it is profoundly political, for it provides the essential context, both material
and spiritual, from which a people forges its politics, strictly defined. Or, as Mintz
eloquently puts it:
It seems to me immensely important to maintain an insistence on the
sociopolitical significance of everyday life—whether we analyze contempo-
rary black power movements, slave revolts, or the growth of a nation.
Throughout history, the massive struggles of whole peoples to discover and

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claim their own destiny has been waged against a background in which love,
hate, personal loyalty, the rewards of propinquity and familiarity, and the
ordinary pleasures of existence continue to make irrevocable claims upon the
human spirit, The peoples of the Caribbean, predominantly poor, rural,
agricultural, and illiterate, have been as subject to these claims as any other
peoples in world history. Crops must be planted, cultivated, and harvested;
babies must be conceived and born; young people must fall in love; old people
must be cared for. The animal and spiritual needs of all human beings demand
satisfaction, no matter what the convulsions of history (p. 32).
The central idea of slavery, from the masters’ point of view, was the absolute
submission of the slave to the master. Theoretically, the slave represented no more
than an extension of the master’s will. Stanley Elkins, in his controversial book,
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, charted the
logic, although by no means the historical reality, of this system.3 But human
beings, including slaves, do not so readily collapse into mindless puppets of the
logical processes invented by their rulers. Theory or no theory, law or no law, whip
or no whip, the slaves manifested wills of their own, and every manifestation of
those wills, no matter how trivial to outsiders, constituted resistance to the system,
for it imposed limits on the power of the masters within a system of ostensibly
unlimited power. Mintz shows, among other things, that each specific response by
slaves and groups of slaves to the system of control imposed upon them must be
studied in its particularity—that an understanding of the worlds the slaves made for
themselves must rest on a dissection of the discrete ways in which particular slaves
at particular historical moments combined the legacy of their ‘‘embattled’’ past with
the emergent demands of their painful present.
Mintz tells us that he is merely trying to etch in the background against which
great historical events have occurred and will occur. This claim is too modest.
When, for example, he explores the origins and nature of the African elements
in Caribbean life, he demonstrates the limits within which all modern
ideologies—Pan-Africanism, nationalism, Marxism—must operate if they expect
to sink deep roots in these heterogeneous societies. In particular, Mintz carefully
lays out the ways in which the Caribbean peoples, including the blacks, have had
a variety of historical experiences within which differences match similarities in
importance.
These considerations lead Mintz to confront the vexing question of the
relationship of class, race, and nationality, not in terms of the balance among
these elements but in the way in which class shapes culture and vice versa, and the
way in which each separately, and both as an organic whole, shape the struggle for
national identity. His examination of historical orgins, of types of metropolitan-
colonial relationships, and of plantation economic systems all form necessary parts
of a search for a coherent theory of the relationship of class, culture, and nation.
Mintz’s papers on Puerto Rico and Jamaica, for example, make bold new
departures that have already yielded results in the work of other scholars, some of
whom occasionally even acknowledge his influence. By tracing the stages in the
development of a plantation during and after slavery, Mintz in effect offers a better

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model than we have had for the study of New World plantation systems. Its special
value lies in the links it helps establish between those plantations based on slave
labor and those based on wage labor and various forms of disguised bondage.
Whereas most other efforts to define and examine the continuities and disconti-
nuities have focused on economic organization—sometimes with excellent
results—Mintz sets the economic organization itself in a broader social framework.
Mintz treats us to a careful, empirically grounded analysis of the stages in the
development of the plantation system at the unit level. Other scholars, especially
historians and sociologists, have followed this procedure before, but it is done here,
probably for the first time, from a theoretically integrative anthropological point of
view. The material basis (land, labor, techniques of production, etc.) receives
careful attention, as do the limits it places upon human action. But that human
action never appears in these pages as something passive or receptive—as mere
object or superstructural reflex. On the contrary, minute details of social life and
culture appear with a new power because Mintz demonstrates the ways in which
they in fact do mold and ultimately inform the material basis of production. Nothing
is irrelevant. The ways in which slaves, and later freedmen, cooked their food,
reinterpreted received religious doctrines, organized a division of labor in the home,
sang songs, worked hard or shirked—the ways, big and small, they shaped their own
lives—provided them with reference points of their own. These reference points had
strong African antecedents, but also drew on Europe, the colonial setting, and above
all on the immediate plantation community. The slaves ruthlessly appropriated to
themselves everything they needed and could use. The world view they fashioned in
consequence allowed them to meet the demands of the economic and social system
without fully becoming its creatures. That the system took a heavy toll, culturally as
well as physically, is beyond doubt. But it could not produce the robots it wanted.
The struggle of the masters to impose their will, of the slaves to resist it, and of the
compromises and antagonistic unity that resulted cannot be understood without a
detailed, specific study of the cultural mechanisms of everyday life. This kind of
study lies at the heart of Mintz’s work.
The masters provided the material conditions of production, which shaped what
they themselves were to become. Together, as a ruling class of men who presided
over a regime of ‘‘things,’’ they sought to make their laborers an extension of their
own will. But, as Mintz convincingly demonstrates, the slaves and peasants created
lives for themselves even within the narrow limits set by the regime. They stretched
and ultimately broke through those limits, not so much by waging frontal warfare—
although they did their share of that—as by making themselves into human beings
and building a collective community life upon their own self-created humanity.
Their effort changed, for better or for worse, both the masters and the machines; the
oppressed and the oppressors together defined the regime as a whole and
simultaneously shaped each other.
Mintz does not, however, leave matters there, as is the fashion among those
social scientists and social historians who invoke the cultural creativity of the lower
classes either to minimize their misery and the force of oppression or, alternatively
and from the ‘‘left,’’ to escape having to discuss the price every people must pay for
channeling its creativity into a cultural response to exploitation, oppression, and

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terror. Mintz faces these painful questions and relates the admirable cultural
achievements of the slaves and peasants to long-term political weaknesses. In the
Caribbean these questions of class and culture loom large in a consideration of the
new problems of nationalism. Mintz reveals the terrible price paid by each society
as a whole for the racial and class biases that prevented the planters and the
metropolitan elites from recognizing how much the slaves and peasants had in fact
built both for themselves and for the island nations now struggling to emerge.
If Mintz seems cautious about attributing a central role in social change to class
forces, the logic of his interpretation of culture carries the argument onto essentially
Marxian ground. And no Marxism that fails to take his ideas seriously is likely to be
worth much. His interpretation of historical process is, however, marred by
ambiguity and a dubious theory of capitalist development.
Mintz repeatedly obscures the distinction between the capitalist mode of
production and capitalistic elements in other modes of production. He does not, for
example, clarify matters when he writes: ‘‘The African slave trade and slavery itself
were ultimately bound up with the spread of European military and colonial power
and with commercial developmerits, especially in overseas capitalistic agriculture’’
(p. 9). Or when, despite his appeal to Marxian categories, he suddenly shifts to
antithetical ground and implicitly seeks the mainspring of historical development in
systems of exchange rather than systems of production by contrasting capitalism
with ‘‘isolated manors’’ (p. 47).4 Or when he writes: ‘‘The establishment of the
plantation system meant a rooted overseas capitalism based on conquest, slavery
and coercion, and investment and entrepreneurship… Thus, the growth of slave-
based economies in the New World was an integral part of the rise of European
commerce and industry…’’ (pp. 9–10). Or when he slides over major problems of
interpretation: ‘‘Hence the development of slave systems outside Europe was
important to European development; the slave economies were in fact dependent
parts of European economies…’’ (p. 10). Every statement in these passages is
individually defensible. But neither individually nor together do they address the main
theoretical question they are meant to address. And nowhere does Mintz hedge more
outrageously—the more so since he rarely hedges at all—as when he alludes to unnamed
and probably nonexistent opponents: ‘‘The curious view that slavery and capitalism are
mutually exclusive still persists’’ (p. 47). If that view—not so much curious as
manifestly stupid—does indeed exist, we ought to be told where and by whom.
Marx cogently analyzed the ways in which capitalism, from the moment of its
birth in Europe, fed upon prior social systems, and in our day we haye seen
innumerable instances of advanced capitalist countries deliberately frustrating
incipient bourgeois-nationalist movements in underdeveloped countries so as to
exploit resources under the de jure control of essentially seigneurial rulers. But this
process has always been contradictory, as Lenin brilliantly perceived in his
celebrated critique of imperialism. The relationship between metropolis and colony
has generally been propelled by the contradiction between pre-capitalist propertied
classes in the colonies, and the bourgeoisies ruling the metropolis and therefore
indirectly ruling the colonies as well.
Mintz presents an essentially sound interpretation of the Caribbean slave regimes
as mere appendages of European capitalism. The problems arise when he

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extrapolates from the Caribbean case, or set of cases, and speaks broadly of
European expansion and the colonization of the entire New World. His argument
would be unobjectionable for the Caribbean if he were to qualify his analysis of
Saint-Domingue to account for the profound cleavage between the France of Nantes
and Bordeaux on the one hand and that of the interior on the other;5 and if he would
more sharply say what his historical reconstruction in fact demonstrates about the
Spanish Caribbean –that early colonization reflected essentially seigneurial forces
and that only later, With the sugar boom and foreign penetration, was Cuban slavery
transformed along the bourgeois lines long dominant in the Anglo-Dutch Caribbean.
I should not dwell on these matters of qualification and tangential refinement
were it not that Mintz’s interpretation can and undoubtedly will be used to support
the dubious (and fundamentally anti-Marxist) theory of historical development
propounded thoughtfully by Paul Sweezy and recently developed with erudition and
considerable intellectual acuteness by Immanuel Waller-stein.6
Mintz insists that slavery, the plantation systems, and indeed colonial exploi-
tation as a whole represented the outward thrust of a rising European capitalism.
Despite the attempts of Sweezy, Frank, and others to give this argument a Marxian
cast, it soon proves incompatible with a Marxian interpretation of historical process,
which necessarily stresses class relations of production rather than changes in the
market and exchange relations—a distinction hammered at by Marx and defended
skillfully by Maurice Dobb, H.K. Takahashi, and others. The road Mintz has chosen
leads quickly enough either to Werner Sombart’s idealism or to the mechanistic
economic interpretations of a Pirenne (on whom Sweezy relied) or a Braudel (on
whom Wallerstein now relies). Mintz implicitly takes his stand with Pirenne and
Braudel, who at least offer plausible alternatives and appeal to historical evidence.
But Mintz, like those great French bourgeois historians whom he does not directly
cite, encounters Sombart’s difficulty anyway. Thus we learn of the ‘‘contradictions’’
in Spanish expansion, at the heart of which lay the lack of a suitable private
bourgeois sector (p. 255). Mintz spares us Sombart’s solution, according to which a
bourgeois spirit miraculously ap-peared in Spain in the fourteenth century, just in
time to found an empire, and then miraculously disappeared, just in time to account
for the subsequent failure of Spain to create anything remotely like a capitalist
society.7 Indeed, Mintz wisely falls silent.
Having criticized this viewpoint elsewhere,8 I here shall restrict myself to one
preliminary observation and then proceed to indicate the ways in which Mintz’s
work, despite this theoretical aberration, actually reinforces and promises to enrich a
Marxist interpretation. The preliminary observation concerns the nature of the
much-debated ‘‘general crisis of the seventeenth century,’’ which was general
precisely in affecting the society as a whole and which therefore is most usefully
envisaged as a crisis of the seigneurial social order. The capitalist sector suffered a
specifically economic crisis, which Eric J. Hobsbawm has skillfully outlined, but
this crisis of Europe’s advanced sectors was analytically distinct from, although
historically enmeshed with, the general social crisis; in itself it was general only in
Hobsbawm’s restricted sense of being international.9 Were Mintz to relate his
historical account to these wider developments, he might not be so ready to

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assimilate the whole of the Afro-Caribbean experience to the bourgeois aspect of a

historical process marked by declining as well as rising social classes and systems.
Mintz’s wobbling into a fundamentally anti-Marxian view of capitalist devel-
opment as a projection of commercial expansion is the more unfortunate since it
proceeds on a level of abstraction divorced from the splendid content of his
empirical studies and his rich forays into anthropological theory. Thus, he
painstakingly and sensitively explores archaic social forms in their historical
settings and in reference to their political implications. In so doing, he significantly
sharpens the theory of social classes, which, while at the heart of the Marxian
interpretation of history, is in the process of becoming a blunt tool of analysis.
The possibilities inherent in Mintz’s work emerge most clearly from a critique of
its more mechanistic portions. For if strong dissent from some of his favorite
propositions is in order, so is warm appreciation for his reorientation of the
discussion. Specifically and briefly, we may consider the social implications of his
view of the plantation as a quasi-industrial enterprise and of his view of the
relationship between slave accommodation and resistance.
It is one thing for Mintz to chide scholars for slighting the quasi-industrial nature
of the plantation system; it is another for him to slight in turn what he calls the
‘‘deceptively rural, agrarian, pseudo-manorial’’ quality of slave-based plantation
production. To no small extent the quarrel concerns specificity. Mintz focuses on the
great sugar plantations of the Caribbean, with their heavy capitalization of land,
labor, and machinery, their considerable reliance on industrial processing, their
large numbers of slaves, and their frequent control by absentee businessmen. But
surely the cotton and tobacco plantations and farms of the United States, with their
minimal capitalization of anything except labor—a gin only cost $125—their
limited processing facilities, their small slave force, and their resident planters, must
introduce heavy qualifications.
Questions arise even for the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, not to mention
those of Brazil. Mintz no doubt has made a valuable contribution by his
demonstration of the manner in which the plantation system broke the African
agriculturalist into a regime approaching industrial discipline. However cruel and
costly—and Mintz does not hide his indignation—these hideous regimes did
prepare millions of people to cope with some features of the technology and
economic organization of the modern world. And yet, what was the result? Once
emancipated, they turned their backs on much of the role to which they had been
assigned and, in Mintz’s splendid term, ‘‘reconstituted’’ themselves as peasantries.
Mintz also shows, in one of his most piercing insights, that they had prepared
themselves for this reconstruction by their own efforts within the slave system itself.
The paradox implicit in Mintz’s analysis reflects the contra- dictory nature of the
plantation reality he is describing.
As a case in point, consider slave attitudes toward work and time. The plantation
produced for a world market and required an appropriate level of output and
economic rationality. Therefore, the views of work and time that the masters tried to
impose on their slaves were typically bourgeois: work as a matter of duty, time as a
matter of money. But for obvious reasons there was no way they could successfully
impose such values, and the historical evidence from every slave society shows that

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in fact they failed. Mintz reminds us that the familiar charge of ‘‘laziness’’ against
the slaves must be balanced against the undeniable fact that they did the work
necessary to produce the surplus off which their detractors lived. But they worked
according to a rhythm of their own, alternating great bursts of energy and
enthusiasm with periods of exasperating slackness and indifference. Like other
preindustrial workers and peasants, they demanded and got concessions to their own
sense of time, which eschewed the regularity of clock-time for natural rhythms
based on daylight, season, and religious beliefs. In the end, the planters made no
more concessions than were compatible with a satisfactory level of performance and
profit, but these were enough to underscore the importance of the rural and
fundamentally preindustrial quality of the system.10 As a result, the blacks came out
of slavery, in different degrees in different countries, having been disciplined to
certain features of modern economic life but simultaneously having had their
decidedly premodern patterns of work, time, and leisure disastrously reinforced. The
political implications of this ambiguous legacy remain to be explored.
These or other quarrels only emphasize Mintz’s greatest achievement, which is,
in my opinion, his contribution to a theory of social change—of historical process.
If, as my own reading of his work suggests, he supports Marx’s insistence on the
centrality of social classes, he also confronts the problem of the nature of these
classes in a new way. Marxist historiography has always been plagued by the
crudeness of its definition of class. At first glance, life is simple enough: classes are
defined as the relationship of groups to the means of production. Taken straight, the
recurrent problem of ‘‘class consciousness’’ has no meaning apart from requMng
theories to explain ‘‘false consciousness.’’ Happily, the exigencies of politics have
forced Marxists, as well as non-Marxists, to resist settling for this first glance, if
only because it soon exposes itself as almost useless. One way to confront the
problem is to retreat into subjectivism, and we have recently been treated to a rash
of theories according to which a class only becomes a class when it achieves class
conscious-ness—a point of view that nicely disposes of virtually all peasantries, and
most other socioeconomic classes for that matter. It is, after all, not helpful to
declare that: (a) all workers in all countries belong to one class; (b) this international
class is exploited by an international bourgeoisie against which it should unite; and
(c) in event of war the class should turn its guns against its particular bourgeoisie—
and then to howl with rage when workers assert national loyalties. On the surface,
we confront a classic case of ‘‘false consciousness’’: the workers do not yet perceive
their own true interests. But a bit below the surface we begin to notice a strange
phenomenon. Often these very workers believe that their class loyalties dictate support
for their nation and that they are bound by ties of interest as well as sentiment more firmly
to their ‘‘own’’ bourgeoisie than to workers of another country. In effect, they often
define their own class—quite class-consciously—to be a class within a wider national
community rather than within some abstraction known as The World.11
Much more than culture accounts for these and other historical blocs. Economic
interest, for example, carries its own weight. Indeed, Mintz’s suggestion that
imperialism must be understood as intrinsic to capitalism—as pre-figured in its
origins—and not as a separate stage of economic development, reminds us of how
little we yet know about the historical roots of the political and ideological links

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among the classes of metropolitan Europe in relation to the colonial peoples. But it
is no less clear that a common culture has provided a powerful—perhaps the most
powerful—tie between the rulers and the ruled within modern nation-states.
The obvious is, as usual, not so obvious. There are, after all, profound differences
between the culture of Brooklyn dock workers and that of Wall Street bankers;
theremay be even greater differences between the culture of Jamaican peasants and
that of the Kingston elite. Yet ruling classes, when they are not in their death throes
and relying on naked force, rule by mediating these differences within the context of
a hegemonic ideology—‘‘hegemonic’’ because it compels the lower classes to
define themselves within the ruling system even while resisting its aggression with
enormous courage and resourcefulness. The main difficulty with Mintz’s brilliant
work on the relationship of class and culture lies in his skirting of the problem of
hegemony.
This difficulty appears most clearly in the midst of one of his finest analytical
performances. He writes effectively about the complexities of accommodation and
resistance and rebuts the rigid mechanistic formulations that have marked the recent
debate on the ‘‘slave personality.’’ Yet his excellent discussion contains a certain
mechanistic quality of its own:
But there was also accommodation, submission, degradation, and self-hatred.
Moreover, it is clear that some of the most effective forms of resistance were
built upon prior adaptation, involving the slaves in processes of culture
change and retention of a complicated kind. To write off all adaptive
mechanisms as a loss of will to resist is tantamount to the denial of creative
energies to the slaves themselves…. Was the readiness of Jamaican slaves to
grow their own foodstuffs on plantation uplands to be written off as
‘‘nonresistance’’? Through such activities, the slaves acquired skills in
cultivation and marketing that greatly increased thek ability to escape
plantation labor after emancipation; traveled freely to the masket-places,
where they learned much of value (some of which may have been essential in
fomenting rebellion.); demonstrated to observant visitors their capacity to
function independently and intelligently; and acquired liquid capital for
various purposes. Yet no one would call subsistance cultivation and marketing
mechanisms of ‘‘resistance,’’ for the very good reason that they were not
resistance as such, but forms of accommodation. At the same time, suicide—
since it deprived masters of their labor—is correctly labeled ‘‘resistance,’’
even though, once dead, one does precious little resisting (p. 76).
The brittle dichotomy Mintz poses between accommodation and resistance does
violence to the dialectical character of the specific analysis. For example, he avoids
any such brittleness in his remarkable analysis of ‘‘Caribbean Peasantries as a Social
Science Problem.’’ There he writes of the post-emancipation period: ‘‘The creation
of peasantries was simultaneously an act of Westernization and an act of resistance’’
(p. 155). His previous reliance on the time-honored divorce of accommodation from
mechanisms of resistance dissolves when he addresses such specifics; then he treats
us to more subtle and accurate descriptions of a single dialectical process.

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The difficulty stems from Mintz’s attempt to bypass the problems posed by the
ideological character of the slave regime considered as a whole. Certainly, these
problems, especially for the Caribbean, present enormous complexities and
frustrations. I have argued elsewhere that accommodation and resistance in the
southern United States constituted complementary and organically connected slave
responses to an imposed paternalism that expressed the essence of a hegemonic slave-
holders’ ideology.12 But this interpretation, even if it proves correct, cannot simply be
extended to the Caribbean, for the social nature of the slave regime there differed
radically from that in the Old Southl We may therefore readily appreciate the greater
difficulty posed for those who try to bring coherence to the Caribbean experience. But,
as the best portions of Mintz’s essays show, he is working toward a formulation that
transcends the superficial bifurcation of resistance and accommodation. In no other
way can Mintz’s judgment on black culture realize its full potential: ‘‘To survive at all
under slavery was a mode of resistance; the cultures of contemporary Caribbean
peoples are in their entirety a testament to such resistance’’ (p. 229).
The significance of Mintz’s cultural explorations, and not merely of his direct
discussions of nationhood, therefore extend forward as well as backward in time.13
His efforts do not, as he warns his readers, end with a disentangling of the threads
that bind class and nation, but they do bring us closer to that desired result. His
careful dissection of specific peasantries reveals, first, their ethnic conditioning, and
second, the way in which the emergent, ethnically conditioned peasantries have in
turn shaped the struggle for nationality. This point of view and the evidence on
which it rests strengthen, in my judgment, the argument for the centrality of social
classes in historical process, but they do so in a fresh and significant way for those
who would study the past and present so as better to shape the future.

Notes

1 The book is divided into an Introduction (‘‘Afro-Caribbeana’’) and three parts.

Part I (‘‘Forced Labor and the Plantation System’’) contains three essays:
‘‘Slavery and the Afro-American World’’; ‘‘Slavery and Forced Labor in
Puerto Rico’’; and ‘‘The History of a Puerto Rican Plantation.’’ Part II
(‘‘Caribbean Peasantries’’) contains five essays: ‘‘The Origin of Reconstituted
Peasantries’’; ‘‘The Historical Sociology of Jamaican Villages’’; ‘‘The Origins
of the Jamaican Market System’’; ‘‘The Contemporary Jamaican Market
System’’; and ‘‘Houses and Yards among Caribbean Peasantries.’’ Part III
(‘‘Caribbean Nationhood’’) contains two essays: ‘‘The Case of Haiti,’’ and
‘‘Caribbean Nationhood: An Anthropological Perspective.’’
2 Among Mintz’s many contributions that cannot be discussed in this review-
essay is an arresting analysis of the differences between the emerging nations
of the Caribbean and other so-called Third World nations. Mintz’s interpre-
tation reinforces the deep suspicion that the formulation ‘‘Third World’’ is at
best analytically useless and at worst a political swindle. And just what are
those other ‘‘two worlds’’ anyway?

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3 Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and

Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959); Ann J. Lane, ed., The Debate Over Slavery:
Stanley Elkins and His Critics (Urbana, IlL, 1971).
4 Mintz repeatedly comes close to identifying the seigneurlal (or ‘‘feudal’’)
mode of production with manorial isolation and self-sufficiency. Nowhere does
he confront the Marxian objections to this identification, as best argued in
Maurice Dobb’s seminal Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York,
1947). This deficiency leads Mintz straight to his dubious identification of
capitalism with the spread of commercial capital.
5 See, e.g., the suggestive analysis in Edward Whiting Fox, History in
Geographic Perspective: The Other France (New York, 1971).
6 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern WorM-System: Capitalist Agriculture and
the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New
York, 1974). This book deserves a full critique in its own right, which must
await another time and place. Its argument, however, is prefigured in Sweezy’s
attack on Dobb and in Frank’s position. See Maurice Dobb, ed., The Transition
from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York, 1955), which includes Sweezy’s
critique, a reply by Dobb, and contributions by a number of noted Marxist
scholars. See especially H.K. Takahashi’s attack on Sweezy’s position.
7 Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Stud), of the History and
Psychology of the Modern Business Man (New York, 1967), esp. pp. 134–136.
Sombart’s viewpoint has caused a good deal of mischief in Luso-Brazilian
studies. See, e.g., Bento Carqueja, O Capitalismo moderno e as suas origens
em Portugal (Oporto, 1908) and especially, Roberto C. Simonsen, História
econômica do Brasil, 1500–1820 (2 vols.; São Paulo, 1937). But see the
critique by the Marxist, Sergio Bagú, Economı´a de la sociedctd colonial.’’ Ensayo
de la história eomparada de Ame´rica Latina (Buenos Aires, t949), p. 54.
8 Eugene D. Genovese, The Worm the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in
Interpretation (New York, 1969), part one.
9 E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century,’’ in Trevor Aston,
ed., Crisis in Europe, 1560–1660 (New York, 1967), pp. 5–62.
10 For an elaboration see my Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New
York, 1974), book two, part two. I am afraid that Mintz’s viewpoint
inadvertently leads toward that of Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman,
whose Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (2 vols.;
Boston, 1974), manages to transform the slaves into puritanized Afro-Saxons
with a bourgeois work ethic that would have made Benjamin Franklin green
with envy.
11 For an elaboration of these remarks and an alternative to a reliance on doctrines
of ‘‘false consciousness,’’ see my ‘‘Yeoman Farmers in a Slaveholders’
Democracy,’’ Agricultural History (forthcoming).
12 Again, I cannot pursue the matter here, but those who wish an elaboration may
consult Roll, Jordan, Roll, the whole of which is devoted to this argument.
13 Mintz’s treatment o f nationalism and regionalism raises many questions,
including the problem of the class nature of the state. On these matters, too, he

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has much to say and much to contribute to the development of Marxian

thought. But these matters, like so many others suggested in this rich book, will
have to be pursued elsewhere.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Ananth Aiyer and Anthony Marcus for inviting me to write
this essay; both provided important comments and advice. In addition Jason Antrosio, Louis Kyriakoudes,
Alex Lichtenstein, Patrick Neveling, and Mark Smith provided helpful suggestions on very short notice.

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