Rebecca J. Scott's Slave Emancipation In Cub The Transition To Free Labor

In 1985 author, historian, and Professor Rebecca J. Scott released her very well received book, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899. Using clear, direct prose, Scott condenses nineteenth-century Cuba's multicolored social geography, its indirect legal schemes, and the complicated social and racial tensions that determined the course of emancipation, which she explains was a process. Scott’s argument is simply that the emancipation of slavery in Cuba did not occur simply because of the power that Spain had in the region, or because of economic inconsistencies. In reality, Scott claims, slave emancipation was a prolonged, slow-going process that came to fruition through a series of social, legal and economic transformations.
In the process, she undoes previously made explanations of why Cuban slavery devolved as it did: for instance, she demonstrates that slavery was not antithetical to technological advancement or intensified capitalist organization of sugar production. Her detailed treatment of the role and nature of Chinese indentured labor--its relationship to slavery; the economic, ethnic and social dimensions of the opportunities it offered plantation owners and managers--comprises a breathtaking glimpse into the grim polyethnic logic of plantation profits in the New World, even as it demolishes theories that the presence of Chinese laborers reveals the fatal weaknesses of slave labor in Cuba. Indeed, one of the enduring themes of the period is the bewilderingly hybrid nature of Cuban plantation labor during the transition away from slavery. At any given sugar mill, one might encounter slaves (both African and Afro-Cuban), Chinese indentured laborers, autonomous gangs of Chinese contractors, prisoners, free wage-earners, tenant farmers and Spanish soldiers all breaking their backs to harvest and process the cane. One is also left with a clear picture of the dramatic geographic differences--the huge and technically advanced mills of Matanzas in the west, Havana's distinctly urban dynamic, the east's rebellious and racially mixed smallholders. Add to this the turbulent military and colonial contests that shaped, and were shaped by, the process of emancipation, and Professor Scott's achievement becomes even more astonishing. Throughout all this, she smoothly incorporates illuminating quantitative analysis (in the form of dozens of tables), and poignant personal dramas as slaves persistently participated in the processes that would determine their freedom