Industrial Plantations: Mechanization, Wage Labor, and Migration in the Postabolition Atlantic World

As historians E. P. Thompson and Herbert Gutman have demonstrated, machines revolutionized the way people engaged in productive activities in the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution not only transformed factories, it also entered farms, mines, construction sites, and other loci of production. And plantation agriculture was not immune to the changes of Machine Age. As systems of unfree labor disintegrated in the Atlantic World, abolitionists, agricultural reformers, and capitalists worked together to promote mechanization as a means to overcome the crisis of slavery and create an even more efficient mode of production. They saw industrial machinery as the most effective tool to keep ex-slaves working on the plantations and attract immigrants to these same areas. The promoters of mechanization at once tried to preserve and reinvent the plantation system. They used machines to increase and improve production while exploiting and controlling an increasingly mobile and heterogeneous workforce. Industrial machinery applied to agriculture ensured that the rural workforce would be subjected to a system of wage labor. This paper draws examples from Brazil, the United States, and British, French, and Spanish colonies to address how antislavery forces contributed to the emergence of agroindustry based on wage labor in the post-abolition era.