Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Abstract

Scholars have studied slavery’s history in North Amer i ca from many angles, ranging from regional histories centered on specific crops to broader works that explore gender, transatlantic connections, culture, and economics. David Silkenat’s recent book explores slavery as environmental history. The book is based on the premise that for nearly two hundred years, “the environment fundamentally shaped American slavery, and slavery remade the southern landscape” (2). Southern historians have long been aware of the impacts of slavery on the landscape, dating back to Avery Craven’s 1926 study of soil exhaustion in Virginia and Maryland; however, much of the scholarship has tended to take the form of agricultural rather than environmental history.1 Cash crops and slavery were so intertwined that it is natu ral to place those histories in an agricultural framework. Agriculture is fundamentally connected to the land, so it is impossible to write an agricultural history without considering the environment, but ultimately, environment is not the primary lens in agricultural histories. Silkenat places environment at the center of his study. In doing so, he deftly weaves two hundred years of diverse history from across the region into a thoughtprovoking narrative that synthesizes decades of scholarship on slavery and southern agriculture. The book’s thesis pre sents an in ter est ing dilemma: To what extent was slavery constrained by the environment and to what extent did slavery shape the environment? Building on works by historians such as William