The drivers story : labor and power in the world of Atlantic slavery The story of the driver is the story of Atlantic slavery. Starting in the seventeenth century Caribbean enslavers developed the driving system to solve their fundamental problem: how to extract labor from captive workers who had every reason to resist. In this system enslaved Black drivers were tasked with supervising and punishing other enslaved laborers. In The Drivers Story Randy M. Browne illuminates the predicament and harrowing struggles of these men and sometimes women at the heart of the plantation world. What Browne asks did it mean to be trapped between the insatiable labor demands of white plantation authorities and the constant resistance of ones fellow enslaved laborers In this insightful and unsettling account of slavery and racial capitalism Browne shows that on plantations across the Americas drivers were at the center of enslaved peoples working lives social relationships and struggles against slavery. Drivers enforced labor discipline and confronted the resistance of their fellow enslaved laborers aiming to maintain a position that helped them survive in a world where enslaved people were treated as disposable. Drivers also protected the people they supervised negotiating workloads and customary rights to essentials like food and rest with white authorities. Within the slave community drivers helped other enslaved people create a sense of belonging as husbands and fathers as Big Men and as leaders of diasporic African nations. Sometimes drivers even organized rebellions sabotaging the very system they were appointed to support. Compelling and original The Drivers Story enriches our understanding of the never ending war between enslavers and enslaved laborers by focusing on its front line. It also brings us face to face with the horror of capitalist labor exploitation. While critics attacked the driving system as barbaric and backwards in pushing workers to their utter limits it was in fact fundamentally modern a stark example of what historian Walter Rodney called capitalism without its loincloth.