:Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewFictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. Urvashi Chakravarty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. ix+295.Miles P. GrierMiles P. GrierQueens College, City University of New York Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn her first monograph, Urvashi Chakravarty summons the motley assemblage of early modern England’s service society—liveried servants, Barbary captives, students, apprentices, indentures, and theatrical players—to combat the widespread misapprehension that slavery was alien to the realm. Her task is to expose “fictions of [servants’] consent” that attempted to conceal compulsion, alienation, and protoracial techniques of disaffiliation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries behind the myth of an England with “too pure an Air for slaves to breath[e] in” (1).Chakravarty interrogates the scholarly commonplace of England as a “service society” in which voluntary service was so constitutive of civic belonging that even the monarch was portrayed as a servant. In five distinct and skillfully interwoven chapters, Chakravarty examines an array of cases in history, performance culture, and literature in which the “ border between service and servitude” was breached (46)—with the former indicating the servants’ voluntary acts and the latter acts compelled. For example, her fourth chapter adduces contracts that assume the consent of servants to unfavorable terms, while entitling masters to sell those contracts, to distribute provisions and corporal punishment at their discretion, and, in some cases, to determine the length of service. In that chapter, Chakravarty places pressure on the contracts’ blank spaces and handwritten addenda to highlight the absence of (sometimes illiterate) servants’ consent and masters’ significant power to set and amend terms. Having demonstrated these gaps and asymmetries, Chakravarty argues, it becomes harder to maintain the notion that unfree service existed only outside England.1 In a world in which the potential for coercion was ever present, although legally disguised, English society sought to banish slavery from the conceptual landscape but kept finding it close to home—in grammar schools, London pageants, and stage shows—and, indeed, at the heart of the family. For example, in her third chapter, Chakravarty mines the “disjunctions and interstices between the meanings of famulus as both ‘slave’ and ‘family’” to reveal the necessary estrangement of even English-born servants whose “intimate” service makes them “potential threats to the affective and discursive fictions of the household” (11).I was especially impressed with the second and fifth chapters. The second chapter argues that, by reading and performing in the plays of Terence, an African enslaved in Rome and later manumitted, “the [English] grammar school pupil was conscripted into the conceptual and discursive frameworks for slavery.” She continues, “pedagogy was explicitly being used and exploited as the basis for bondage, as children more generally were increasingly implicated in their own fictions of consent” to forced labor and corporal punishment (46). This chapter also engages English experiences of “Barbary captivity,” which scholars typically cite to disconnect Mediterranean slavery from that of the Atlantic world. Chakravarty argues, “These larger contexts of captivity and bondage for the reception of classical slavery … work to authorize racialized slavery; if the schoolroom enactment of slavery operates to render bondage thinkable and even palatable, the English ability to both participate in and be redeemed from slavery … functions to justify the enslavement of other peoples” (47). In order to rationalize the desire to become a slaveholding empire, English society needed technologies for producing a “marker or ‘stain’ of slavery” (46)—and assigning it to those they hoped to keep as slaves.This mark reappears throughout the project but takes center stage in fifth and final chapter, which focuses on the macula servitutis, a metaphorical stain of slavery (perhaps connected to the tattoos that stigmatized many Roman slaves). Chakravarty demonstrates that, in Roman literature, a servant bears the macula “indefinitely,” as “part of an ongoing affective, affiliative, and performative relationship” (180).2 Indeed, she contends that the “freedman frequently seems to articulate a sense of greater loyalty and obligation to his master than the slaves still in bondage” (180). After employing Roman texts as sources for a surprisingly fresh interpretation of the relationship of Prospero to Ariel and Caliban of The Tempest, Chakravarty fulfills the promise of the chapter and the book with a bravura reading of the foreboding case of Adam Saffin, an African in late seventeenth-century Massachusetts, whose “master” exploited an array of “fictions of consent” in attempts to extend Adam’s servitude beyond the term of his contracted service. Adam proved a troublesome famulus, either unable or unwilling to perform the choreography of “simultaneous intimacy and subordination” demanded of the household servant (193). He was not, precisely, a slave: he earned a wage, was provided the same food “as the English servants,” and promised manumission after seven years. Yet neither was he at liberty: Adam had to seek legal remedy at the end of the term to prevent his sale “out of this province into forreigne, parts to remaine a slave during his life” (193). Social categorization of Adam as a “negro” did not automatically indicate slave status. Yet neither was this epithet irrelevant: imagined racial traits were of material concern in deliberations, as magistrates weighed whether John Saffin could reasonably impose the condition that Adam—a member of an “ignorant, rude, and bruitish” race—serve “quietly” to earn manumission (194). By the end of the chapter, Chakravarty has shown what the English learned from their resorts to classical precedent. Manumission remained contingent on the master’s determination that service had been rendered cheerfully—and liberty greeted with sobriety and palpable gratitude. Further, it would appear that the shameful “stain of slavery” would live on in the Atlantic world as stigmatized blackness.Chakravarty’s work will be easy to teach to undergraduates as a whole or in excerpts, as it addresses major court cases and canonical works of Shakespeare and Milton. Scholars will find a rich archive of indenture contracts, servants’ letters, grammar school etymologies, legal proceedings, epic poetry, dramatic performance, vestments, and stigmata. The book makes a definitive statement within early modern studies that will also be valuable to those who work on classical reception, the later Middle Ages, and hemispheric early American studies, to scholars interested in the persistence of the feudal and those interested in the emergence of Atlantic capitalism. Its economic, social, and political range is tremendous; its theoretical apparatus sophisticated but unobtrusive—due, in part, to the precise language employed in her thorough development of the central claim. From undergraduates to advanced researchers, Fictions of Consent will provide much to consider and debate for years to come. Chakravarty has both solidified the early promise of early modern critical race studies and opened the door for a newly invigorated dialogue with early American studies, Black studies, and queer studies, to mention but a few pertinent fields.3 I, for one, heartily welcome the discussion to come.In that discussion, I would like to see additional pressure placed on historicist language—such as that unfree labor in England anticipates that in the New World. One issue to be considered in the wake of Chakravarty is the extent to which slavery can be racialized in the absence of stark phenotypical difference.4 To what extent did English subjects existing on the border of freedom understand their liminal status and either make common cause with bound persons or lay claim to freedom as a racial birthright?5 It seems to me that a key chapter in the history of whiteness as a racialized claim on liberty lies in this social and cultural problem—one that arguably persists today.Notes1. Chakravarty brings terms and questions from critical race studies to bear on the work of predecessors, such as David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Service (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Judith Weil, Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Evett, Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Mark Thornton Burnett, Masters and Servants in English Renaissance Drama and Culture: Authority and Obedience (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997); and Elizabeth Rivlin, The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012).2. She makes special note that the blot or blemish indicated by macula “attaches itself not only to the mind but also to the body of the slave” (251 n. 4).3. Chakravarty harmonizes a disparate group of scholars. Alert readers will hear echoes of Jeffrey Masten, Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 757–77; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Moreover, they will find that Chakravarty’s work locates the material history gestured at in the metaphorical title of Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016).4. Cedric Robinson writes, “The Atlantic slave trade was not the first slave system, nor the first slave system engaged in by Europeans, nor the first slave system to affect Europeans or their ancestors, and not the only slave system to produce a racialist culture… . The fact that the phenotypes of the enslaved and the slavers differed insignificantly did not erode the force of the racism which victimised Koreans, Poles, the Irish and others who experienced the misfortune of long-term slavery or domination” (“The Inventions of the Negro,” Social Identities 7, no. 3 [September 2001]: 331).5. Chakravarty’s book could serve as the prelude to works such as Laura Anne Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Ahead of Print Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/723264 Views: 99Total views on this site HistoryPublished online November 23, 2022 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.