Review: Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America, edited by Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg

Abstract

Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds. Slavery in the City: Architecture and Landscapes of Urban Slavery in North America Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017, 200 pp., 30 illus. $32.50 (cloth), ISBN 9780813940052 Slavery was a violent, pervasive, and pernicious institution that left a terrible stain on the moral character of the United States, one that has persisted to this day. Many well-intentioned people still believe that slavery's physical environments were limited to southern rural plantations, but Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg's edited volume Slavery in the City makes clear that slavery was also embedded within urban settings throughout the South and North, in a surprising variety of iterations. Other scholars have addressed urban slavery (myself included, as Ellis and Ginsburg note in their introduction), but our knowledge of its built environments is advanced significantly by this collection of essays, which offers new information from a variety of methodological perspectives. This slim volume provides a much-needed corrective to our limited understanding of the physical and psychological conditions of slavery in the United States. It also informs us that a number of factors, including demographics, directly influenced the shape of urban slavery. Its publication will be of value not only to architectural historians but also to scholars of history, anthropology, and African American studies. Edward A. Chappell's chapter constitutes the most ambitious contribution to the book. Retired director of architectural and archaeological research at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Chappell is a preeminent expert on the built environments of Williamsburg and Jamestown. In his chapter, he maps slave spaces in Williamsburg, Annapolis, Baltimore, Charleston, and other southern U.S. cities. He also compares those communities to Falmouth, Jamaica. Chappell examines what Elizabeth Collins Cromley has called the “food axis”—the pathway of food from the place where it is cooked to the space where it is …