The driver’s story — Out NOW
A compelling AND unsettling account of the enslaved men—and women—at the very center of enslaved people’s working lives, social relationships, and struggles against slavery.
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.
Praise
“The Driver’s Story is the first intensive study of the plantation slave driver, the Black head man of the fields with the agonizing dual role of maximizing the owner’s harvest through any means possible, including torture, and being an enslaved person himself…Browne is to be commended for exploring one of slavery’s most complex and even troubling stock characters. We may never understand why drivers made the choices they did, taking subversive action in some cases and remaining strategically silent in others. But this book lucidly and provocatively advances the discussion.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“The Driver’s Story is a critical contribution to scholarship on the nexus of race, power, and capitalism in the Atlantic world...[A]n achievement of archival research, close reading, and careful analysis, and a major contribution to the expanding historiography of racial capitalism.” —H-SLAVERY
“Browne’s engaging study offers a nuanced and valuable contribution to the fields of labour history and histories of slavery...[His] examination of the drivers’ position, their function, their social role, and efforts to build communities, as well as the violence and horrors they faced in these efforts, allows us to understand better the durability of the plantation system in the face of so much resistance and struggle. The Driver’s Story enriches our understanding of the plantation regime and the complexity and nuances of enslaved labourers’ struggles for survival.” — Labour History Review
"This utterly captivating and unflinching book leads readers deep into the driver's challenging world. It provides an unusually close-up view of enslaved people's daily lives as they faced their enslavers and each other. Indispensable to anyone interested in slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism." — Marjoleine Kars, author of Blood on the River: A Chronicle of Mutiny and Freedom on the Wild Coast
"Browne’s vital book does three things extremely well. It makes an important argument about the centrality of drivers to the functioning of plantation capitalism and the social and political lives of the enslaved. It offers a penetrating analysis of the existential predicament of people who became drivers. Finally, it presents a highly readable story about one of the most vexing topics in human history: oppressed oppressors. The Driver’s Story will occupy a significant place in the historiography of slavery." — Vincent Brown, author of Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War
"In his impressive, deeply researched book, Randy M. Browne helps us to understand driving as a practice throughout Caribbean plantation slave societies, while grounding his analysis in specific lives and places. Drivers, Browne shows us, lived a ‘nightmare’ in which they were terrorized into terrorizing others, leading to deep damage to them even while they reaped some tangible material rewards. Browne’s insights, particularly into the politics of drivers and the development of rebellions, will surely be influential in future scholarship." — Diana Paton, author of The Cultural Politics of Obeah: Religion, Colonialism and Modernity in the Caribbean World
About RANDY
Randy M. Browne is an award-winning historian of Atlantic slavery who specializes in the British Caribbean. He is the author of The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (2024) and Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (2017), which received the biennial Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians. Randy is Professor of History and Director of First-Year Seminar at Xavier University. His scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Library Company of Philadelphia, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the U.S. Department of Education, and The Huntington Library. His articles on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Slavery & Abolition, and the New West Indian Guide. Randy received his B.A. in History and Spanish from Eckerd College and his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in Cincinnati with his wife and son.
