The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays

by Eugene D. Genovese

A seminal and original work that delves deeply into what slaveholders thought.

Genres: History, American History, Economics, Nonfiction, Race

274 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1971

About the author

Eugene Dominic Genovese was an American historian of the American South and American slavery. He has been noted for bringing a Marxist perspective to the study of power, class and relations between planters and slaves in the South. His work Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made won the Bancroft Prize. He later abandoned the Left and Marxism, and embraced traditionalist conservatism.

Reviews

[JS Found · Rating 4 out of 5]

Genovese was a Marxist historian who explored slavery from the point o view of the slaveholders. And the African-American slaves. He sought to take the slavers claims seriously and to try to understand them, without labeling them as the ahistorical "evil." What I mean is that they were more complicated than that and to dismiss their ideology is to ignore the real exigencies and justifications of why slavery existed in favor of sweeping that period and those people as anomalies. To truly prevent slavery from happening again, we must know how it came about in the first place.

The World the Slaverholders made attempts to answer that question. It is divided into two parts, or two long essays. The first is an essay on the slavery in the New World as contrasted with slavery in the Southern United States, where it found its fullest, deepest and most culturally significant expression. By writing about slavery in such countries as Cuba and Brazil, Genovese highlights the important differences and really the two different systems: slavery in those countries never became a full class question and society was never stratified into free states and slave with completely different ways of life and economic systems for each. The Southern slave society was a pre-capitalist, seigneurial society built on the primacy of class, not race, but very much informed by the latter. The slaveholders in those Latin and South American countries were businessmen first and foremost and slavery was another economic product, not a whole way of life like it was in the US. When things got tough--when the abolition movements exploded and when business was affected--they changed. Also they did not live next to their slaves but were absentee landlords so they had no stake in preserving a way of life they fled to live in capitalist Europe.

The second essay is the best and one of the best if not the best Genovese has done, in this reader's reading of three books of his (his first three books I believe). It is on George Fitzhugh, Southern intellectual who wrote the clearest expression of why slavery should exist. Genovese was a Marxist historian and this really pays fruition here. Fitzhugh was not a Marxist, as he never read Marx, but he did believe that capitalism was an evil system that was untenable and against man and God. Capitalism was a destructive force that exploited man and kept him in chains and poverty. With its stress on the individual, it asked what can society do for me instead of what I can do for society. It broke apart families and communities because if everyone was for themselves, then some would rise to the top and forgo any human feeling towards their fellow man, exploiting them and making them live in poverty. This is what capitalism did without question. The true society, the God society, the society of the family and the community that valued bonds of affection, love and care was a slaveholder society. By having slaves, the master felt the bonds of family. He took care of his people and they in turn worked for him. This was the only way to erase the pernicious effects of capitalism, a philosophy that pitted man against man. Slavery on the other hand built communities. Suffice to say, Fitzhugh did not dwell on the ironies of his position. But this is very fascinating reading. You can agree with Fitzhugh now about the dangers of capitalism-- because of what's going on today: Crash causing banks leading record profits; income inequality at its highest; millions unemployed while a few at the top earn billions--and still abhor his motivation and final conclusion of defending slavery.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

By their hypocrisy ye shall know them. If racism is as American as apple pie one big reason is the need to defend slavery based on the color bar. Eugene Genovese, my pride and inspiration when I set out to become a historian, wrote these two essays to expose how slavery and capitalism looked from the Southern slaveholders point of view, thus exposing the cruelty of capitalist exploitation in the North. If you wish you may sample the first, on the ideology of slavery in the U.S. South in the nineteenth century compared to Cuba and Brazil, where slaveholding required no ideology. Genovese is at his greatest in the second essay, on the Southern gentleman and polemicist George Fitzhugh, who argued eloquently for slavery over wage-slavery up North as the more humane system, particularly for the slaves. Fitzhugh was an inverted Marxist. He thought the horrors of capitalism justified holding people hostage for a lifetime and passing on slavery to their descendants in perpetuity. Was he all that wrong in condemning the North for its hypocrisy on wages versus a lifetime of servitude? A fine two-punch essay from America's foremost historian of slavery.

[PatC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not for general readers. Assumes a lot of knowledge about/familiarity with global slavery, about economics, and about southern intellectual George Fitzhugh, whose place in the history of slavery and political theory Genovese rather tortuously tries to establish.

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was the U.S. South a capitalist society or pre-capitalist while engaging in the wider market? Genovese does an excellent job engaging in this debate, and although I think he extrapolates a bit too much (especially from the second essay) this book is definitely worth the read.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting discussion on the proslavery view on american slavery

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

First essay's on how the rise of new, more "progressive", social forms of expropriation "ironically" resulted in the rebirth and growth of older forms of expropriation in the New World and Eastern Europe, one factor in this being the relative strength of the Western European peasantry. Touches on the differences between slavery in Cuba, Brazil, Anglo-French territories, the Caribbean and the American South.

Second essay's an ideological, as well as filtration through economic Marxian categories, analysis of pro-Slavery ideologues in the American South as presenting for the slave-holding class a politically viable justification to base a conservative ruling alliance upon. Focuses in on how the patriarchal element of the master-slave relationship was being presented as being just as emotional as any other valid relationship between parents and children and how this was ideologically being used to justify potentially extending slavery to all labour, even on a non-racial basis. Like many political theorists today they were sneakily calling for more, decentralized, government and this would guarantee the utmost discipline for labour. Maybe this wasn't just an embarrassing psychosis of the protestant bourgeois spirit but something that should be taken more seriously?

[Fred R · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first essay, although often interrupted by bursts of Marxist jargon as if from a garbled transmission, is a reasonable summary of slavery in the new world. His discussion of the difference between absentee and paternalist slaveholding is well taken.

The second essay is where the real meat is. Eugene Genovese, himself an idiosyncratic thinker, undertakes to summarize and analyze the work of George Fitzhugh, as fullest expression of the ideological development of slavery in the new world. Not only does the work of Fitzhugh and others give the lie to the ahistorical belief (as demonstrated, for instance, in a recent article by Kwame Anthony Appiah) that Southern slaveholders did not believe that slavery was justified, but it is also an enjoyable (from an aesthetic point of view) excursion into a worldview utterly alien to our own.

The occasionally glance at Catholicism became more interesting when I remembered that Genovese himself converted to Catholicism late in his life.