Sean D. Moore. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814.

Abstract

In his deeply researched and persuasively argued new book, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814, Sean D. Moore reveals that the earliest libraries established in what became the United States built their collections using funds derived from the Atlantic slave trade. Moore focuses on the institutional histories of the libraries themselves while also paying close attention to the borrowing practices of patrons over the course of the eighteenth century, leading up to American independence. The libraries at the heart of this book also helped cultivate sophisticated “reading networks” that functioned like social networks “for their members and for their communities at large” (viii). Not only did the era of the American Revolution witness a dynamic shift in ideology but Moore insists that the role of books and literature in American civic life were altered as well. Each chapter is a case study of a particular library, as Moore hones in on the Salem Social Library, Newport’s Redwood Library, the New York Society Library, the Charleston Library Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. Beyond the subtleties of each library’s unique history, Moore also engages in close readings of important literary works that would have been available for patrons to borrow. Ultimately, Moore asks “how British books were received and adapted to the needs of colonial communities in the era of the American Revolution, how they influenced thinking about abolition, and how libraries helped enable civic engagement concerning these issues” (3). While Moore maintains throughout Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries that slavery and the transatlantic slave trade played an important role in the creation and stocking of these libraries, he also suggests, rather convincingly, that “antislavery sentiment” in colonial North America and the early American Republic “arose, paradoxically, on the foundation of slavery-created spaces of reading and the books within them” (34).