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Slaves for Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia * John J. Zaborney * Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012 * xiv, 218 pp. * $42.50
This brief but informative book offers new interpretive insight to a voluminous, albeit somewhat niche, literature on one of the antebellum Souths most unusual practices: the hiring out of slaves as rented labor. Focusing upon this practice in Virginia, John Zaborney undertakes a comprehensive and source-rich examination of slave hiring across lines of industry, gender, and socio-economic status within the white population of the state. He further explores the effects of slave hiring upon slaves themselves, adding new insights to the status of African Americans who were subjected to this practice and arguing, in sum, that its widespread use across society in antebellum Virginia has been largely understated in the historical literature.
Zaborney frames his investigation from the outset by challenging several existing interpretations of slave hiring. In particular, he addresses a long-running scholarly debate as to whether the practice should be viewed as detrimental and exploitative, as hiring typically involved a transfer of coercive and...