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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 by Sean D. Moore Ezra Tawil Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814. By Sean D. Moore. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019. xxvi+256 pp. £58. ISBN 978–0–19–883637–7. The history of slavery and the history of the library: if these seem strange bedfellows for a scholarly enquiry, it may be because we have made one of several questionable assumptions in advance. There may be a general inclination to presume that the history of the book, the formation of institutions of reading, and particularly the rise of literacy are essentially linked to the rise of progressive ideals of liberty and equality—and perhaps even that the very act of reading and writing favours the [End Page 287] abolitionist impulse in some kind of natural way. Even if we (quite rightly) resist that idea as naively whiggish, we may still capitulate to a more subtle methodological presupposition: namely, that the study of the relationship between slavery and print must be conducted in essentially rhetorical terms. That is to say, the history of 'writing slavery', whether in the mode of imaginative literature or of political argumentation, is the history of people taking up a range of discursive positions 'for' or 'against' the institution, and writing texts that can be classified and studied in relation to the argumentative poles of pro-slavery and anti-slavery, and the rhetorical spectrum arrayed between them. In this fascinating book, Sean D. Moore takes an entirely different and novel approach to the question of slaveryʼs historical relationship to modern reading practices. For the history of slavery and the history of printed books were connected, Moore argues, not just via the content of behaviours and linguistic utterances, but in a much more concrete institutional sense as well. The history of library collections was linked to the history of slavery by a transatlantic trading network that put the market for books in an essential relation to the market for African bodies. Books and persons, in this economic world system, functioned as tradeable commodities. Indeed, the earliest subscription libraries in the new United States were institutions built by men who traded in slaves and related commodities in order to purchase, import, and house British books in North America. There were indeed anti-slavery advocates among these men, as well as some who defended the institution. Yet this range of beliefs does not change the fact that there was an essential material collaboration between the slave trade and the book trade. Over time, it is true, this emergent print culture came to be more and more aligned with what Robin Blackburn identifies as 'a generalized humanitarian sentiment that tried to break with the prevailing language of commerce, civilization and racial difference' (quoted p. xi) that had characterized the pro-slavery position. Yet this cultural result does not alter the historical reality that abolitionist sentiment developed out of and emanated from the 'very libraries established on the financial basis of slavery' (p. xi). In this way, 'slavery provided the books that would lead to its undoing' (p. 103). Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries investigates this terrain, not through 'the perspective of a historian', but from the position of a scholar of English literature. If, as indicated above, a certain whiggish history of print culture is the most obvious of the assumptions at which Moore takes aim, he also performs several other disciplinary realignments along the way. By putting the history of the library squarely in the context of transatlantic trade, the book contributes to the familiar 'Anglicization' thesis in the history of the Revolutionary era, which asserted that 'Americans were paradoxically seeking high British culture and taste at the moment they were rejecting British rule' (p. 22). Moore brings this social-historical argument about the 'American purchase of British cultural capital' circa 1776 to literary history, and to the history of the book, by emphasizing the unique power of imported British books in the formation of early American national culture...