The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston (review)

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• The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World by Katherine Johnston
• Michael Boyden (bio)

The Nature of Slavery: Environment and Plantation Labor in the Anglo-Atlantic World
katherine johnston
Oxford University Press, 2022
264 pp.

This meticulously researched book draws on a wealth of archival materials spanning three centuries to cast a fresh eye on the history of African slavery in the English Caribbean and the American South. As Johnston convincingly documents, the persistent idea that Africans were more tolerant of the heat and therefore more suited to labor in tropical conditions did not emerge out of the lived reality on the plantations. Rather, it was a deliberate and strategic fabrication on the part of the planter class to convince legislators, investors, and colonial officials that African slavery was indispensable—indeed, natural—to the plantation economy. Since ancient assumptions about the deleterious effects of hot climates disposed the European public sphere to consider the tropics as a dangerous and unhealthy place for whites, this "climate rhetoric"—as Johnston calls it—was highly effective in swaying public opinion in favor of racialized slave labor. What was initially a strategic move on the part of the slaveholders eventually hardened into an unshakable belief in the impossibility of white labor in the tropics, the legacy of which continues to be felt to the present day.

Johnston tells the history of this transformation over six tightly organized chapters. The first sketches out the conditions that gave rise to plantation slavery in the Greater Caribbean during the seventeenth century. Contrary to what historians have long assumed, the colonists' actual experiences with the tropical climate were not a decisive factor in the shift toward African slave labor. Indeed, early explorers, settlers, and physicians did not observe marked differences in the way whites and Blacks responded [End Page 149] to the new environment. The shift to Black slave labor was due to a shortage of white indentured servants after the English Civil War, in combination with the consolidation of plantations into larger estates, which limited postindenture prospects for white laborers. The idea that Black peoples were better suited to work in the Caribbean climate was invented to naturalize a system that emerged out of economic pressures given the lack of white laborers. As Johnston indicates, the climatic rhetoric was reinforced by two mediatized events during the latter half of the century that further damaged the reputation of the Caribbean colonies in Britain, namely the Western Design of 1655, a failed attempt to wrest Hispaniola from Spanish control, and the Port Royal Earthquake of 1692, which reinforced received ideas regarding the dangerous climate of the tropics. Combined, these events solidified a narrative of the tropics as the white man's grave.

The second chapter focuses on the early history of Georgia, which originally did not allow enslaved workers on the assumption that this would jeopardize the stability of the colony. The experiment was short-lived, however, as a group of dissatisfied settlers referred to as the "Malcontents" successfully lobbied with the Georgia Trustees to lift the ban on slave labor. In their appeals to the Trustees, the Malcontents resorted to climatic rhetoric, arguing that the whole plantation system would crumble without enslaved Africans, whose bodily constitutions were deemed to be perfectly attuned to the hot and humid climate. However, as the Malcontents were fully aware, the real reasons for transitioning to African slave labor were very different: apart from the already mentioned difficulty of recruiting white workers, many colonists in Georgia had investments in the slave trade and were unable to compete with the large rice plantations in neighboring South Carolina. The climatic argument stuck with the Trustees, who had no firsthand knowledge of the actual conditions in the colony. The Georgia experiment thus proved short-lived, although its influence would linger in later debates on the differential influence of tropical climates.

While the influence of the climate did not play a role in the shift to African slavery in the Americas, it did have a major impact on the shape of the British Empire. As chapter 3 documents, colonists approached climates as highly localized determinants of the health of individuals...