Charles Tilly (1984) has advocated the study of “big structures, large processes and huge comparisons” as the surest path to knowledge in the present conjuncture. This essay follows his lead with a comparative study of the transformation of the sugar industry in Martinique and Cuba during the nineteenth century. Slavery in the Americas is commonly viewed as an archaic form of social and economic organization that is incompatible with modern forms of economy and polity emerging in the nineteenth century. Such a perspective presumes the singularity of slavery and represents its abolition throughout the hemisphere as a linear transition to capitalist modernity.

In recent years, due in part to the increasing diffusion of constructivist conceptions of the social and historical world, statistics has attracted the attention of historians more as an object than as a means of investigation and analysis. While quantification and statistical methods have lost the popularity they gained among social historians in the 1960s and 1970s, new and important histories of statistics and of the theory of probability have appeared that shed new light on the subject (Porter 1986; Stigler 1986; Kriiger et al. 1987; Hacking 1990). These works have traced—at times in highly original and sophisticated ways—genealogy and developments of the statistical methods and probabilistic conceptions that are at the basis of today’s quantitative practices.

Between the Civil War and World War I the American economy was reshaped by the forces of industrialization. In 1870 the United States was still a predominantly rural and agricultural society concentrated in the area east of the Mississippi River. By the early twentieth century it had become a largely urban and industrial society of continental proportions. The growth of railroads, cities, mines, and factories, along with shifts in the sectoral and geographic patterns of economic activity, required the mobilization of vast quantities of capital and labor (Perloff et al. 1965: chap. 14). The formation of efficient factor markets capable of responding to these demands was an important ingredient in the rapid economic growth of the postbellum United States. The evolution of financial market institutions in response to the demands of late-nineteenth-century industrialization has been studied in some detail (Davis 1965; Sylla 1969; James 1978; Snowden 1987, 1988), but relatively little is known about the history of labor market institutions after the Civil War.

On New Year’s Day in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves in much of the South. Lincoln’s act transformed the Civil War from a sectional rebellion to a war of liberation. Although the proclamation’s immediate legal effect was minimal, since it touched only those areas still resisting Union authority, its political effect was far reaching and dramatic. With a single stroke of his pen, Lincoln ensured that the Union victory would create a new class of citizens, the freedmen, numbering well over 3 million. Almost all of these new citizens were landless and destitute. Despite their new legal status, they were faced at the war’s end with a social structure that regarded them as inferior, treating them with contempt at best and with violent fury at worst. In emancipating the slaves and overturning the economic and social basis of southern society, the federal government shouldered the responsibility of finishing what it had begun, making the freedmen citizens.

The ideas of socialism grew in ordinary people’s lived experience of all-encompassing markets, totalizing doctrines of individualism, the power of capitalist property over human dignity and destiny, and equations between market success and human merit. Codified into doctrine, socialism was pro-ductivist, seeing the work experience as that which determined personal identity and the shape of social collaboration. It was also class analytical, mapping the social world in terms of classes in conflict and specifying the working class as the central social actor and agent for change. Third, it was egalitarian democratic, rejecting arbitrary distinctions determining different stations in life. Finally, socialism was Utopian, revolutionary at least in aspiration if not always in deed. The capitalist order could be, and ought to be, radically transcended. Socialism, which would follow, would reappropriate control over work and its fruits by “the workers” and would facilitate full democracy, equality, and the consecration of a creative and cooperative social order.