Complexion of Empire in Natchez: Race and Slavery in the Mississippi Borderlands

Abstract

In Complexion of Empire, Christian Pinnen describes the faltering emergence of racial slavery in borderlands that changed hands four times in the eighteenth century. Established circa 1720 as a French outpost “at the outskirts of … the transimperial Greater Caribbean,” Natchez, Mississippi, came under British rule in 1763, Spanish rule in 1779, and in 1795 assumed U.S. territorial status (p. 4). Using state documents, court records, and archival manuscripts, Pinnen reconstructs the efforts of people of color to manipulate dissimilar legal systems to their advantage. Collectively, they depict the erratic transition from reliance on “complexion in combination with socioracial categories” to define the status of nonwhites, to a reliance on phenotype alone (p. 5). Pinnen emphasizes the “transnational character” of Natchez and the “liminality” and “legal pluralism” that prevailed until those borderlands became “bordered lands” between two nations (pp. 13, 7, 31, 182). The first chapter examines French attempts to establish a slave society akin to those in the Caribbean and the Southeast. The French Code Noir proved inadequate because Native Americans and Africans “denied the French legal superiority” and purportedly joined a revolt that destroyed the settlement (p. 5). Chapter 2 describes a brief period of British rule that saw an influx of planters with fixed notions of patriarchy and chattel slavery. Pinnen maintains that the 1766 slave code of British West Florida “cemented current ideas of liberty” and spurred immigration from the East (p. 14).