The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

Abstract

Jason T. Sharples has two parallel goals in this excellent history of slave conspiracy scares in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the one hand, he persuasively analyzes such panics for what they disclose as “white community rituals” rather than as evidence of the extent of slave resistance, as has been done in much of the earlier scholarship (p. 13). On the other, Sharples argues that, when carefully interpreted, trial records—such as those from the best documented conspiracy scare of the seventeenth century, the Barbadian insurrection of 1692—reveal how the enslaved suffused these records with their own “African conceptual lexicons,” thereby allowing historians “to recover more details of life in enslavement” (pp. 23, 14). Buttressing his discursively based arguments with quantitative data in chapter 2, Sharples correlates the frequency of conspiracy scares with times of rapid demographic change (most notably, during surges in slave imports) or periods of heightened military...