Driver’s Story

Regular price €42.99
A01=Randy M. Browne
african diaspora
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Atlantic slavery
Author_Randy M. Browne
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Barbados
big men
Caribbean slavery
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=HBTB
Category=HBTS
Category=JBSL
Category=JFSL
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTS
community advocate
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
early modern
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
history
jamaica
Language_English
oppressed oppressors
PA=Available
Plantation
Price_€20 to €50
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Racial capitalism
rebel leader
Slave drivers
Slave labor
Slave resistance
slave trade
social death
softlaunch
sugar
white authority

Product details

  • ISBN 9781512825862
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 07 May 2024
  • Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

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The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system, enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Driver’s Story, Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men—and sometimes women—at the heart of the plantation world. What, Browne asks, did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of one’s fellow enslaved laborers?
In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism, Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas, drivers were at the center of enslaved people’s working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers, aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised, negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community, drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging, as husbands and fathers, as Big Men, and as leaders of diasporic African “nations.” Sometimes, drivers even organized rebellions, sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support.
Compelling and original, The Driver’s Story enriches our understanding of the never-ending war between enslavers and enslaved laborers by focusing on its front line. It also brings us face-to-face with the horror of capitalist labor exploitation.

Randy M. Browne is Professor of History at Xavier University and author of Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.