A Texas Peasantry? Black Smallholders in the Texas Sugar Bowl, 1865–1890

This article examines a small community of former slaves in Texas's leading sugar-producing county and argues that local conditions fostered the growth of a Caribbean-style ‘reconstituted peasantry’. Using local sources to compile a database of 79 African American landowners, it traces the postwar decline of the sugar plantations, the process of black land acquisition and the smallholders' strategies for survival. The smallholders' position, however, was precarious, and most lost their lands at the close of the nineteenth century. The piece concludes by suggesting that more intensive local research into former-slave communities may force a reconsideration of the notion that all American slaves became landless wage labourers. © 2007 Taylor & Francis

Slavery and Plantation Capitalism in Louisiana's Sugar Country

Sugar planters in the antebellum South managed their estates progressively, efficiently, and with a political economy that reflected the emerging capitalist values of nineteenth-century America. By fusing economic progress and slave labor, sugar planters revolutionized the means of production and transformed the institution of slavery. Slaveholders and bondspeople redefined the parameters of paternalism and recast the master-slave relationship along a novel path. Louisiana slaves accommodated the machine, holding no torch for Luddism while concurrently shaping the agro-industrial revolution to achieve modest economic independence and relative autonomy within the plantation quarters