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
"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
WINNER, ELSA GOVIEA BOOK PRIZE
A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival
Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive.
Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death.
Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.
PRAISE
"[A] deep microhistory, based on fortuitously rich sources that a gifted historian uses to illuminate a previously obscure world with profound humanity . . . Browne's book on Berbice gets us more deeply into the lives of enslaved people in the Caribbean than any other work of nonfiction that comes readily to mind." — Journal of British Studies
"[A] carefully constructed and deeply researched study that challenges many prevailing perspectives, tropes, and arguments . . . This is a compelling interpretation that adds new layers of complexity to our understanding of the social and political worlds of New World slavery." — Slavery & Abolition
"Browne's unparalleled examination of the difficult lives of enslaved people makes Surviving Slavery required reading for historians of Atlantic slavery." — Journal of the Early Republic
"Concisely and elegantly written . . . Surviving Slavery focuses on how slaves, masters, and colonial authorities negotiated the terms of labor, punishment, provisioning, and other quotidian issues. Boasting a rigorous methodology and deep archival research . . . Browne makes an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the legalities of Atlantic slavery and the varieties of lived experience among the enslaved." —Journal of Social History
"Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean is a necessary, brilliantly researched, and well-narrated history. It deserves to become standard reading for scholars interested in imperial reform, the practice of imperial law, and the everyday politics of colonial subjects." —Victorian Studies
"[An] illuminating new monograph on the slave society of Berbice during the era of amelioration . . . What results from Browne's research is a monograph replete with stories of the everyday struggles and conflicts that characterized every Atlantic slave society. Browne has crafted the best portrait of the slave driver to be found in the literature." —Social History