Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery.

• Author: Tushnet, Mark V.
• Position: Book review

DEGREES OF FREEDOM: LOUISIANA AND CUBA AFTER SLAVERY. By Rebecca J. Scott. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. xi, 365. $29.95.

INTRODUCTION

Rebecca Scott (1) is a historian, not an economist. Describing how a dispute over a mule's ownership was resolved, Professor Scott reproduces a receipt two claimants left when they took the mule from the plantation whose manager claimed it as well (p. 185). By contrast, analyzing property relations in the pre-Civil War American South, economic historian Jenny Wahl observes, "[E]conomic historians tend to [use] ... frequency tables, graphs, and charts." (2) The differences in visual aids to understanding indicate the various ways historians and economists approach a single topic--the relation between markets and politics, the latter defined to include the deployment of collective force. Professor Scott's theme is the mutual dependence of markets and politics in post-emancipation Louisiana and Cuba. Professor Scott examines post-emancipation Louisiana and Cuba, which are similar in some respects and different in others. Sugar production was important in both locations, for example, but the politics of freedom differed: In Louisiana freedom resulted from the North's defeat of the South in a civil war, whereas in Cuba it resulted from an independence struggle by Cubans, including slaves, against colonial domination. (3) Few economists would disagree with many of the propositions that they would extract from her narrative. Yet the tension between narrative and proposition is apparent.

This Review explores some aspects of that tension. Part I describes in largely economic terms some aspects of the post-emancipation property arrangements that Professor Scott describes historically. Relying on Professor Scott's descriptions in Part II, I sketch why her insistence on the mutual dependence of markets and politics is correct, with some speculation about why a division of labor among economists leads many economics-influenced legal scholars to underemphasize that dependence. It would be foolish to claim, and I do not, that only a historian could illuminate the mutual dependence of markets and politics. Rather, the historian's narratives and the economist's propositions shed light on that phenomenon from different angles.

One way of putting the differences is this: the historian offers narratives that the economist sees as instantiations of the kinds of general propositions economists capture in their equations. (4) Economists worry, though, that, lacking the discipline imposed by some well-specified theory, historians include in their narratives matters that more rigorous analysis would show to be irrelevant to the larger story the historian is telling--chance events such as the weather conditions on a particular day that lack the causal significance that the historian's narrative implicitly imputes to them simply by including them in the story.

While the economist offers general propositions, historians in turn worry that the economists' equations may provide accurate depictions of aggregate behavior, but exclude too much individual human experience that might be relevant to the larger story. Historians tend to be theory-skeptics, at least in the modest sense that they doubt that the theories we now have at hand are the ultimate theories that will account for the behavior they observe in history. They include material in their narratives that they sense might be important in the end, even if they do not yet have a full set of propositions that explain the material's relevance. (5)

Finally, historians are devoted to what economists would call small-N studies, that is, studies with few observations, on which one cannot reliably establish general propositions. Professor Scott's study has but two observations. Although some economists would be dismissive of a study that, as they view it, has only two data points, good economists appreciate small-N studies because they can suggest hypotheses that might be tested by examining a larger number of cases. Yet, economists have "priors" about which hypotheses are likely to be testable, and so will extract "economic-like" hypotheses from the historian's narrative more readily than they will extract other hypotheses. And when the economists do so, historians may see the economists as strikingly narrow. (6)

1. THE RIGHT TO PROPERTY AND CONTRACT

   Slavery was, among other things, a system of organizing the use of labor in farming and other forms of production. But, referring to Cuban planters (though true in Louisiana as well) Professor Scott writes, "[T]hey did have to face the reality that in the long run some other form of organization of labor would need to be developed" (p. 95). What follows are some descriptions of arrangements that arose to replace slavery.

   Some farmers in Cuba owned their own land and sold their sugar cane to larger plantations and refiners. In Professor Scott's words, the contracts

   provid[ed] for a share of the benefits to go to the individual grower but pegg[ed] remuneration to the price of sugar in order to minimize the financial risk for mill owners. The mill would make advances, supervise certain aspects of the growing, and receive the cane, settling the account once a season. (p. 117) Although Professor Scott describes these contracts as "draconian," one of the cane purchasers "complained that the 'colonos [farmers] are giving us much more trouble than we anticipated ... refus[ing] to sign new contracts unless we make them large advances, for more than...