Matthew Pratt Guterl

Guterl makes a strong case for re-contextualizing the U. S. South within the framework of other post-emancipation Caribbean and Latin American countries. It was appealing to read a transnational understanding of issues traditionally thought to be unique to the U. S. South. In fact, the experiences and difficulties of the region were similar, if not almost identical, to those of Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and other pan-American colonies. Interesting narratives are explored by the author in order to prove the concern and interaction that Civil War era Southern elites had with Latin American labor problems. The book provides fascinating case studies of ex-Confederates moving to Latin American colonies in order to avoid the loss of enslaved labor, as well as accounts of desperate planters hoping to refill their empty sugarcane and cotton fields with cheap and docile labor from Asia and Europe in order to avoid dealing with “shiftless” and “uncontrollable” freedmen.

Constructing his argument for the interconnectivity of the master class among all American colonies, Guterl relies on case studies and historical narratives. He first details the nineteenth century situations of colonies like Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti, explaining how they were seen as both other and cousin to the U. S. South. Subsequently, after emancipation, many ex-Confederates left in exile to reclaim slavery in the few colonies that persisted in the institution, including Cuba and Brazil. Through firsthand accounts and historical evidence, Guterl shows how many Southerners found only temporary respite in those colonies where slavery was soon to be abolished. These colonies also experienced the labor problems that the U. S. South was facing in the post-emancipation era. Global solutions were presented, including indentured servants from China and contract workers from Sweden, Germany, and Italy, but ultimately there was a return to black labor once Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow laws were instituted. Guterl does a wonderful job pulling from various sources that serve to support his argument for interconnectivity. Memoirs and letters from the pan-colonial master class are carefully analyzed and serve to elucidate the globalized nature of post-emancipation labor issues.

Guterl doesn’t get caught up in the aura of one particular place, like Havana or New Orleans, and instead chooses to connect all of the Americas into a struggle to adapt and integrate a population of free labor where there once was slave labor. In a thoroughly convincing and comprehensive work, he truly makes the case that the U. S. South has more historically in common with Caribbean and Latin American colonies than with the colonies of the northern continental United States. In turn, the modern U. S. business CEO has more in common with the colonial master class than with the “hardworking Protestants” that “founded the United States.”

Guterl makes this brutal connection when discussing the exile of ex-Confederates in chapter three. He explains that the relocation of U. S. plantations to Cuba in the post-emancipation era is an earlier model of moving companies overseas for cheaper labor, claiming that “one generation’s slaves and coolies have evolved into another’s H-2 workers and third world dispossessed; [master class chauvinisms] are a crude precedent for the breezy and callous corporate style of the modern-day executive, relentlessly folding up factories and moving them to ever cheaper sites with little regard for the human cost." While arguably heavy-handed and unsubstantiated, the connections between modern global business practices reflect the values and ways of the nineteenth century master class. I was surprised to see such a connection made in this book mainly because it was the only digression made by Guterl throughout the work. Regardless, I was struck by how true the connection rang out for me, thereby allowing me to expand the concept of “master class” beyond slaveholders to factory owners, political despots, newspaper tycoons, and other elite and entitled groups that have “enslaved” people throughout time. In this line of thinking, the U. S. South becomes just another global example of hierarchical abuse and hegemonic manipulation, usually to the benefit of other global elite. The U. S. South has always been seen as closed off and exceptional while the Southern elite that had direct access to global trends all along. Laborers and lower class citizens were certainly not mobile or wealthy enough to engage with the world on a global level, at least not in the nineteenth century, unless it was the will of the master class. The transportation of global labor contradicts this to some extent, but not if one realizes that Chinese immigrants and European laborers would not have come to the U. S. South had it not been at the behest of the global master class.… (plus d'informations)