Finalists
The Driver’s Story: Labor and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) by Randy M. Browne is an exceptionally well-written and researched contribution to the literature on slavery in the British Atlantic World. Browne focuses on drivers: enslaved people who were elevated by plantation owners into managerial positions. The book reveals that driving was an impossible job because drivers had to constantly tread a fine line between their owners’ demands and their workers’ resistance. While the drivers’ lot may have been difficult, they nonetheless played an essential role in perpetuating and expanding Caribbean slavery at the expense of other enslaved people. The Driver’s Story is hence essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why Atlantic slavery endured and grew in spite of the heroic resistance of its victims.
Old Age and American Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by David Stefan Doddington is an extraordinary study shedding new light on old age and aging in the antebellum US South. Looking at both old age and aging among the enslaved and their enslavers, Doddington shows how each was perceived and experienced differently. Slaves could use old age to resist but also experienced neglect in old age. Where the scholarship has long maintained that fellow slaves respected old slaves, this book highlights that that was not always the case; old and young, white and Black, could abuse the frailty of old slaves. Bold, well-researched and written with exemplary clarity, this fundamental contribution to slavery studies draws a more complex picture of the reality of old age and aging in the antebellum US South.
The Women of Rendez-vous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 2024) by Jenny Shaw, explores the transatlantic journeys of five women linked by marriage, bondage, and servitude to a Barbados politician, planter, and slave owner with whom they had children. Shaw draws on a vast array of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscript and printed primary sources, including court and church records, plantation inventories, wills, and deeds housed in archives in Britain and Barbados. Beautifully written, this book makes several contributions to the understanding of the history of the British Atlantic slave trade and slavery, the history of family and race, and perhaps most of all, the history of women (enslaved, freed, and free) in the North Atlantic world.