Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2025 -

This thoughtful book reexamines one of the most vilified and caricatured figures in Atlantic slavery: the overseer, or what Browne (Xavier Univ.) calls "the driver." Drivers have come to symbolize the Atlantic slave regime's brutal tactics, namely whipping and sexual assault. However, lay readers may not know that most drivers were enslaved Black men. As much as drivers enforced, wielded, and upheld the violence of the slave system, enslavers also subjected these men, and occasionally women, to "relentless surveillance and brutal discipline," trapping them "at the center of the very labor system they were forced to uphold." Browne explores the driver's "fraught negotiations, contingent alliances, and difficult compromises." Yet, the story of the driver is also necessarily that of enslavers, enslaved laborers, fiscals, judges, and other legal officials. Filtering what is essentially a micro-study of the plantation through the perspective of the driver, Browne shows that resistance often lay at the heart of the driving system--drivers could both punish and protect other enslaved people and were at the forefront of many well-known slave revolts and rebellions across the Caribbean precisely because of their influence and authority. To produce this empathetic "human history," Browne expertly and painstakingly sifted through archival records found across the Atlantic World from Guyana to the UK.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.

What is the Black American relationship to the American body politic? That is the question that implicitly motivates Sam Klug's fine, densely packed, and crisply argued book, The Internal Colony. Slavery and Jim Crow defined the Black relationship to both whiteness and to the United States for most of the history of the country (and well before), and while those relationships are necessary elements for understanding Black self-conceptions of their relationship to the country in the second half of the twentieth century, they do not explain the full picture on their own.