Masters and Lords: Mid-19th Century U.S. Planters and Prussian Junkers.

The comparative study of slavery once focused primarily on the western hemisphere. During the past decade or so, however, the scope of comparison has been substantially widened, in books such as George M. Fredrickson's White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (1981), my Unfree labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (1987), and Orlando Patterson's sweeping sociological study, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparativ Study (1982). Shearer Davis Bowman continues the trend in this interesting comparative examination of mid-nineteenth-century slaveholding planters and Prussian Junkers.

Strictly speaking, Prussia's agricultural laborers were not legally bound durin the years 1810-1860, the period on which Bowman concentrates. Nevertheless, Bowman makes a convincing (if somewhat belabored and overly self-conscious) cas for the comparability--which is not to say total similarity--of the planters an Junkers. Although Prussia's serfs were legally freed between 1807 and 1810, the "remained subject to much the same species of 'feudal' political authority that the Junkers had exercised under serfdom" (18), including police power and corporal punishment. Both planters and Junkets were agricultural entrepreneurs who produced staple crops for market (preeminently cotton and tobacco in the South, wheat and wool in Prussia); both "managed their work forces as petty autocrats"(4).

At the outset of this densely-argued, abundantly-documented book (with 122 page of notes for 223 of text), Bowman explains that his goal "is to identify and explore important analogies between planters and Junkers as regional landed elites, and also to isolate and (so far as possible) explain significant differences between their historical milieus" (4). This goal seems satisfactory enough, although such a formulation immediately makes one wonder why he should not be equally interested in looking at differences between planters and Junker and similarities in their historical milieus. But on working one's way through this volume, one realizes that Bowman is less interested in providing a systematic comparison of Junkers and planters (or of the labor systems they directed) than in using this comparative framework to grapple with a number of "contentious concepts" (79) including capitalism, paternalism, patriarchalism, republicanism, racism, and conservatism. Throughout the book, he provides detailed historiographical surveys of these controversial "isms," and then--frequently prefaced by an assertion such as "my own view is" (109) or "from my perspective" (166)--renders his own verdict.

Bowman contrasts the racist republicanism of his planters with the bureaucratic monarchism of his Junkers, but in general the two groups' similarities emerge a far more important than their differences. He portrays both as conservative landed elites set on defending their prerogatives, but he rejects the notion that they were especially paternalistic or patriarchal: "From my perspective," he concludes, "the label paternalism should be limited to a type of upper-class ideology, one that persists into the late twentieth century and was widespread in the nineteenth-century Western world, urban as well as rural, free as well a slave" (166). After extensive historiographical consideration, he also labels mid-nineteenth-century planters and Junkers "'capitalist' rather than 'precapitalist'" (95), and therefore dismisses the idea of a subsequent "Prussian road" to capitalism as "not ... a useful tool of comparative analysis for either the South or Prussia (111).

Bowman's historiographical surveys are informative, interesting, and well-grounded in the pertinent historical and theoretical literature. It is not always clear, however, how a comparative framework furthers his analysis--how, for example, examining Prussian Junkers helps one determine whether southern planters were "paternalistic" (or vice versa). More problematical, throughout this book Bowman seeks to deduce the existence or nonexistence of characteristics whose presence depend largely on their meaning. For example, whether or not one judges mid-nineteenth-century Prussia and the South as "capitalist" depends largely on what one means by the term. If one follows Bowman in adopting a "neoclassical" definition of capitalism, based on the presence of private property, markets, and efforts to maximize profits, Prussia and the slave South were clearly capitalist; as he recognizes, however, under a Marxist definition of "capitalism as a particular system of social relations, a special 'mode of production,' under which wage-earning proletarians sell their 'labor power' as a market commodity" (99), they were not. One can, of course, define terms as one wishes; what is at issue is the utility of these definitions. Implicit in Bowman's choice is the judgment that relations of exchange had a greater impact on the character of the Southern and Prussian social order than did relations of production, or (to put it another way) than the presence of a market for agricultural commodities was more important than the absence of a market for labor-power. Significantly, this was not the view o most contemporary analysts, who saw the era's key conflict as one between coerced and free labor, and referred to capitalism as the "free labor system."

This is an interesting and thoroughly researched book that contains many thoughtful explorations of important issues. For reasons outlined above, however, I am generally more impressed by the information it provides than by the arguments that it makes.

Peter Kolchin University of Delaware