Finished off The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South. The last few chapters were not the best. Eaton gets into discussing the role of instructions to senators and decides this is a vital part of the story, but his argument only makes sense if one accepts a priori that politicians are elected entirely to exercise their own judgment in how they vote. There's been a subtext all along that disinterested, elite governance is just plain superior which is debatable but he takes as a given. Eaton is big on heralding lone iconoclasts standing against popular sentiment, which is normally fine by me, but the ones he gets most excited about are guys who vote against secession and then go ahead and support the Confederacy to the hilt. This doesn't strike me as the most sterling example of strong convictions, particularly in light of the Southern whites who had rather more backbone. But he wrote in 1940 and added a few chapters in the early Sixties. What can you do? Overall it's still a good book, but Eaton is totally a guy who views "the rabble" as a major political category.

Then I went back and did the last three chapters of Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson. Robinson's argument is basically that Marxism is a Eurocentric ideology that may have important insights but on its own is insufficient for understanding the black experience in the New World. I's one hell of a slog and there are numerous points where I disagreed with him on details or caught him in a really breezy generalization, but his central argument remains a good one. If anything, it may be a bit too narrow. Black people in the New World aren't the only population that don't reliably act like orthodox Marxists want them to.

From there I popped over to James Oakes, who I have had some trepidation about since seeing reviews of his recent book on antislavery. But I know his prior stuff didn't have that kind of negative attention surrounding it. I've gotten three chapters into Freedom and Slavery: An Interpretation of the Old South, which is his tentative position on the "is slavery capitalist?" question. Cards on the table: I don't think this is a useful question. The role of slavery in the rise of the American and Atlantic World economies interests me, but the classification of it as capitalist or not on its own strikes me as unlikely to yield any useful answers unless one things capitalism itself is an essential category and its precise technical boundary is vital. I disagree on both counts. Also the classification question elides the coercion available in free labor markets and seems largely to reduce to whether or not one cares for whatever capitalism is.

But I'm two chapters in and both times I've almost read more in a go. It's a good read and if one is interested in the capitalism question then I imagine it's riveting. (Or annoying. Oakes is angling for a hybrid capitalism/non-capitalism answer.) There are useful insights about Lockean theories of government and Enlightenment liberalism in general and how it interfaces with slavery. Like most recent historians, Oakes is good about situating the South within the Atlantic World rather than consigning it to some whip-wielding version of Narnia. I get the impression he thinks European political thought independent of slavery, but considering Locke wrote South Carolina's constitution and the thought he's referencing comes out of colonial powers, I don't quite agree. It's obviously less slavery-dependent since the practitioners usually don't own people themselves, but taking it as a separate thing feels a bit too much.

Hey r/askhistorians long time lurker here, just want to thank you for all the good reads i had in this sub and ask you if you could help me with a book on Indochina's war of independence. Thanks!

Hi all! Looking for books on historiography and on the philosophy of history. As well as Ancient Chinese history. Can anyone help me out?

Edit: Never mind I checked the booklist! Always forget that there is one!