In this deeply researched provocative study of slavery in the Natchez district, Christian Pinnen, associate professor of history at Mississippi College, makes an important contribution to the literature on slavery in North America’s borderlands. Focusing on the Natchez District between the 1720s and 1820s, Pinnen explores the dynamics of making race in four different legal systems—the French, British, Spanish, and US. Throughout the book he puts complexion at the center of his analysis, exploring how Europeans in rival imperial systems worked out new theoretical conceptions of human phenotypes, tied the meaning of slavery and freedom to color and complexion, and by the early nineteenth century made skin type an “all-encompassing marker signifying slavery in territorial Natchez” (184). Over this century, as the region changed hands, each set of settlers had their own ideas of how race and slavery should function. Yet, rather than foregrounding the contestations between these definitions, Pinnen persuasively argues that the rise of chattel slavery in the US south built on and borrowed from the various Native and imperial actors that came before.Over seven chapters, Pinnen follows how slavery and complexion operated within each different imperial system with scrupulous detail, showing that “a uniform embrace of slavery did not lead to a uniform path to defining race or slavery” (10). The first chapter explores the interaction between three different forms of slavery: African, Native, and European (13). Examining the Natchez Revolt of 1729, Pinnen focuses on the failure of European colonizers to create a plantation economy in Natchez. The second chapter examines British colonialism in the region and identifies key developments that would later facilitate making a slave society. Focusing on the slave code disseminated from British West Florida, Pinnen shows how forms of patriarchy unique to the British imperial system, as well as emerging conceptions of race that connected it explicitly to complexion, laid a foundation for later colonizers. The next three chapters comprise the core of the book and explore Spanish colonialism in the Mississippi Valley. Tracing how forms of church hierarchy and colonial administration mediated the power enslavers had over their captives, Pinnen explores why Spanish settlers could not create a slave society on par with others in the Americas. These chapters together stand out for their originality and breadth of research. The final two chapters explore the rise of US hegemony. Pinnen shows how the return to patriarchal forms of hierarchy, and the end of institutional mediation, constrained avenues for manumission and resistance to human bondage. With the onset of cotton monoculture in the early nineteenth century, and the accretion of a century of shifting colonial definitions of race and slavery, US colonizers connected complexion and human bondage as never before in the Natchez District. The rise of US planation systems did not erase what rival empires built in the region, but promiscuously borrowed from them. The irresistible and important conclusion is that the rise of US planter hegemony was far from inevitable and can only partly be explained by looking within the borders of the United States.The research that sustains this sweeping narrative comes from repositories as diverse as the US National Archives, the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, regional repositories across the US Gulf South, and local court records from Adams County, Mississippi. In particular, Pinnen’s use of court cases allows him to recover at least some voices of enslaved people, highlighting their agency to shape the societies that sanctioned their enslavement, and, some of the time, resist their bondage and challenge the connections between race and slavery.A few key studies have bridged the large literatures on slavery in North America and imperial expansion in borderlands, but the conversation between these two massive literatures is not well developed. As a result, Complexion of Empire deserves a wide readership, and can provide a model for other scholars to continue integrating scholarly conversations that too often remain separate.
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Jan 1, 2024
Raj Kumar Sharma 
Open Access
