Slave Research Articles

A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones

Reviewed by: A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas by Kelly Houston Jones Christian Pinnen (bio) A Weary Land: Slavery on the Ground in Arkansas. By Kelly Houston Jones. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $39.95.) Kelly Houston Jones's A Weary Land is a recent entry in the rich history of American bondage, but it inserts some important details into the national story of slavery. Through Jones's eyes, the settlement history of Arkansas in the antebellum period is reinterpreted as a time in which enslaved people were "developing a sense of place in their search for rootedness" (2). While Jones focuses her story on the landscapes of bondage, she reveals the multiplicities that were endemic to borderlands slavery. More important, she shows that "African American Arkansans defined freedom as the ability to control their movement and use of space and the ability to own land and modify it for themselves" (6). Appropriately grounding the experience of the enslaved in the land they were forced to work, she shows the reader the world of slavery truly from the ground up, which promises new analytical solutions for frequently posed questions. Jones puts the history of Arkansas through the paces of a very skilled historian with an eye to the power of slavery on a developing state and landscape. When viewed through this lens, a story emerges that demonstrates how enslaved people made calculated use of space in the attempt to resist their [End Page 107] enslavers. African Americans could not be alienated from the landscape by slave owners, no matter what white people thought or tried. In six chapters, the author paints a picture of Arkansas history that is defined by the state's roots in slavery and westward expansion. Vivid chapter titles refer to regions of—or events on—Arkansas ground and make clear the importance of Jones's connection between human bondage and geography. Chapter 1, aptly entitled "The Morass," uncovers the settlement period of Anglo-American arrivals and their enslaved African American workers. Jones succinctly argues that "slavery is not simply a part of Arkansas's history but a fundamental principle guiding Arkansas's organization as a territory and then a state—a shaping force in … becoming a place" (16). While Arkansas grew as a cotton-producing and slavelabor-absorbing region, the enslaved remained in a position where they were at once forced to do the enslavers' biddings to shape the land in order to generate profit, but also able to move with some freedom. The sparsely settled areas of Arkansas gave both the local African American population and the people of African descent in neighboring states—enslaved and free—ample opportunity to disappear. Sometimes they left for a few days; occasionally, they tried to liberate themselves permanently. Throughout the book, space and place take on important meanings for the enslaved. Jones deftly identifies the ability of the enslaved to bring their own meanings to the landscapes they remade for the profit of others. In her words, the enslaved labored "to master space in order to master self" (34), finding meaning in their forced labor that remained hidden from their enslavers and staking secret claims to land out of view of their captors. As the author explores these facets of landscape more closely, she also analyzes gender, community formation in neighborhoods and churches, commingling of enslaved and poor whites, as well as free people of color, during Arkansas's formative decades as a slave state. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are a deep dive into the story of slavery in Arkansas, focusing on the various and uneven developments in multiple regions of the state. Jones points out again and again that slavery's development in the state is rooted in the location. The Red River valley, for example, differs from the towns along the Mississippi. Depending on soil, access to transportation, and strategic location, the lives of the enslaved could look quite different. Jones shows, for example, how urban spaces could offer some comforts, such as church communities, but were unable to protect freedom seekers from discovery. One of the many stimulating discussions in the book stems from...

Rivers and Bogs: Slow Protests in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko

In Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko, the title character owns enslaved people when he is in Africa and is himself enslaved and forced to migrate to and labor in the Suriname River watershed. The narrator praises his European-ness and denies the value of his African-ness, framing the failure of his shipboard and plantation protests as the fate of a tragic romance hero. But the narrator’s perspective on Oroonoko is only one dimension of this story: the narrative weaves and folds and digresses like a river winding down to the sea, moving through locations that are neither fully wet nor dry, salt nor fresh. Both formally and scenically, Behn challenges readers to move slowly, to resist the desire for narrative and environmental control, to embrace the uncertainty, danger, and shifting, undefined nature of the coastal ecotone. She holds before us the deeply violent consequences of European heroic romance as it drives Oroonoko’s and the narrator’s actions in the Atlantic world and invites us to imagine environments and circuitous logics that protest that violence. Attending to the novel’s coastal-ness enables resistance to dominant English seventeenth-century ideologies about racial, gendered, and species mastery.

A Right to Speak: Formerly Enslaved People and the Political Antislavery Movement in Antebellum America

By running away, fugitive slaves have long been recognized as important figures in exacerbating sectional tensions and sparking the Civil War. But the political impact of runaway and formerly enslaved people extended well beyond their absconding. This essay explores how their lives in and escapes from slavery powerfully influenced the growth of formal antislavery politics. Fugitive and former slaves, along with their white political allies, used their experiences of enslavement to build political opposition to slavery. Formerly enslaved men became vocal speakers for political abolitionist coalitions, convincing listeners to support antislavery politics. Women escapees from slavery, too, pushed white antislavery politicians to adopt more visceral political language. Former slaves' political activism brought a humane dimension to antislavery politics, forcing the nation to see the political struggle against slavery through their eyes and experiences.

Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr.

Reviewed by: Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South by Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. Felicia Jamison (bio) Beyond Slavery's Shadow: Free People of Color in the South. By Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 376. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $35.95.) Beyond Slavery's Shadow explores the varied experiences of free people of color in the southern colonies and the United States from the colonial period to the Civil War. From the outset, Warren Eugene Milteer Jr. makes several arguments that he expertly supports throughout the book. First, he asserts that the struggles of free people of color to maintain their rights and independence were consistently waged against colonial powers and state legislators who "gradually adopted attacks on free people of color as [End Page 116] an indirect defense of an economy propelled by slave labor and as a way to attract support from disaffected whites who saw persons of color as commercial competitors" (3). Free people of color—aided by their allies, which included white neighbors, indentured servants, and enslaved people—constantly fought to preserve their freedom and dignity. Milteer's study incorporates a wide range of persons who were included under the constantly changing umbrella category of "free people of color." The grouping varies depending on the time and place being discussed and includes "individuals labeled 'negroes,' 'mulattoes,' 'mustees,' 'Indians,' 'blacks,' 'pardos,' 'morenos,' 'mestizos,' 'quadroons,' and 'octoroons,' who possessed various ancestral connections to the Americas, Africa, Europe, and South Asia" (8). Free people of color obtained this status in a variety of ways, including being born free, suing for their freedom in the courts, purchasing their freedom from enslavers, being manumitted, or self-emancipating by fleeing from enslavers. The author shows that there was no universal experience for this group. Their lives differed depending on "gender, wealth, reputation, occupation, and family connection" (5). For example, Jo and Ann Sip, a married couple who lived in colonial-era Delaware, were bound out and forced to provide free labor for up to seven years to pay jail fees. In contrast, Rachel Bales was fortunate to have a Scottish grandmother who testified on her behalf as evidence of her free status as a British subject. The titles of the chapters reflect the constant battle to maintain one's rights. The book is structured chronologically, which Milteer uses to good effect. Chapter 1, "Liberty in the Colonial South," builds on the stripping away of rights from free people of color, which often occurred by discouraging interracial relationships. Milteer examines legislation from various southern colonies, such as Virginia's 1662 law that increased the fine for marriage and sex between whites and people of African descent; North Carolina and Maryland legislation that fined white women and bound out their "mulatto" children for several years; and Louisiana's 1724 Code Noir, which forbade marriage between white and Black people under threat of fine or punishment. Chapter 2, "The Revolution of Freedom," emphasizes how free people of color used the opportunity and rhetoric of the American Revolution to obtain more rights, often via an enslaver's manumission or by suing for their freedom in court. Chapter 3, "The Backlash," and chapter 4, "Making Freedom Work," are in conversation with one another. The former shows the backlash of the Revolutionary era in which states passed restrictive legislation that made it difficult to gain one's freedom, and the latter discusses how free people of color sought to maintain their rights [End Page 117] while providing important services to their neighbors as "laborers, farmers, artisans, and business owners" (104–5). Chapter 5, "Rebellion and Radicalism," focuses on the antebellum period after the 1831 Nat Turner Rebellion, in which southern states created laws that stripped away rights from free people of color and often forced them to leave the state after gaining freedom. Chapter 6, "Resisting Radicalism," further highlights the varied experiences of free people of color. Though the free population in the South had increased from 182,070 to 262,322 between 1830 and 1860, the vast majority "remained landless and possessed limited personal property" (193). Nonetheless, during the antebellum period, free people of color...

Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550 by Ida Altman

<i>Life and Society in the Early Spanish Caribbean: The Greater Antilles, 1493–1550</i> by Ida Altman

The Toxic Bully Boss: Echoes of American Slavocracy Tactics in Adverse Workplace Leadership Styles

The Toxic Bully Boss: Echoes of American Slavocracy Tactics in Adverse Workplace Leadership Styles

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin

Walvin’s concise review of slavery in the Atlantic argues that slavery has transformed the West or, indeed, the world to the present day. Chapters in six sections include overviews of Iberian and northern European slave systems, examples from the Middle Passage, slave trade within Brazil and the United States, “managing slavery,” the campaign for freedom, and the argument about the world transformed by slavery—as seen through sugar, tobacco, servile labor, and plantation economies. Walvin’s purpose for writing the book was to restate the history of slavery in support of the discourse around Black Lives Matter.The book’s most original observations are signaled at the opening of the concluding chapter: “The furore which swept round the globe in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought slavery back into widespread public debate.” In Walvin’s words, “Critics everywhere were swift to point out that the origins of that injustice lay deep in the history of relations between Black and white … [and] the history of slavery” (331). As he suggests, public discourse turns to history when the issues become most painful and difficult.Walvin argues that the intensity of the reaction to Floyd’s death was reinforced by an earlier debate. “The 1619 Project,” a series published in New York Times Magazine, appeared in 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the delivery of African captives to Virginia.1 These essays, which reviewed U.S. history through the lens of slavery, prompted heated discussion among Americans of varied backgrounds, but they made virtually no reference to history outside the United States. Walvin argues, however, that this renewed interest in U.S. slavery ignited a global debate that linked police violence worldwide to reminders of social inequity, to statues of imperial generals, and to the wealth garnered by powerful families and institutions from the work of forced laborers.Having argued that statements about the past of slavery and inequality need to be updated, Walvin turns to the historical background underlying the explosion of Black Lives Matter. He begins with World War II, in which people from all over the world fought the Axis powers, after which the inhabitants of colonies were able to claim the rights of national citizens. He acknowledges that the U.S. civil-rights movement of that era performed a similar function: “In the USA, the reconstruction of the Black past lifted slavery out of its essentially regional setting.”Walvin’s perspective on the British Empire reaffirms the argument that the slavery/inequality debate is worldwide, not just American. Walvin shows how children born to immigrant parents in Europe found that their school curriculum did not address their family or national background. Educators had to address the issue of whether a history of Europe were even possible without looking at slavery. In ex-colonial countries, the inherited imperial school curriculum was inflected by a study of national rights and independence, relying on national scholars to explain the contrasts of wealth and poverty. Walvin mentions James and Williams for the Caribbean cases.2 In both the United States and overseas, expanding studies of slavery brought new disciplines to historical study—linguistics, archaeology, and expanded digital analysis.Walvin refers ambivalently to both West and world as the locus of slavery’s transformation. Thus, “for centuries, the Western world at large was inextricably entangled with slavery.” But his sense of the underlying dynamic is clear. The spreading realization of the global ubiquity of slavery and its effects begged two inescapable questions: “Why were we not told?” and “How had Europeans become the Lords of Human Kind?” (336, 343). In fact, preceding research, especially in the last fifty years, had deeply documented slavery. Evidence was plentiful, but many saw it as new. Such is the interplay of scholars and communities.Finally, given the insistent question of what would be a fair response to the end of slavery, Walvin addresses reparations, focusing especially on the website that reveals details of payments to British owners of slaves in the 1830s (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs). The discussion is evidently continuing. At the institutional level, banks and universities have made compensatory payments in recognition of their earlier profits from slavery. Walvin concludes the book with a rhetorical question: “Who could now deny that slavery matters?” (354).

Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, And The Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval

Reviewed by: Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, And The Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy by John Suval Kenneth R. Coleman DANGEROUS GROUND: SQUATTERS, STATESMEN, AND THE ANTEBELLUM RUPTURE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by John Suval Oxford University Press, New York, 2022. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 296 pages. $35.00 cloth. In his first book, John Suval makes a novel contribution to the literature on settler colonialism (and Civil War causation) by replacing the term “settler” with a largely overlooked nineteenth-century term for the hordes of farmers, planters, and speculators who ventured west to occupy land without legal title: squatters. In the 1830s, Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic Party rebranded squatters from lawless interlopers to Indian-fighting heroes who enlarged the nation at little cost to the federal government. Democratic politicians promoted land-for-votes policies that allowed squatters to bypass auctions and purchase the land they occupied at fixed prices. This strategy, deeply rooted in White supremacy, allowed the Democrats to forge a national coalition of planters, farmers, and immigrants that transcended social class. But according to Suval, a specter haunted this squatter-statesman alliance: slavery. The emergence of the Free Soil ideology among many squatters put them at odds with pro-slavery Democratic politicians. Suval argues that this contradiction, at the heart of what he calls Squatter Democracy, led directly to Bleeding Kansas, the fracturing of the Democratic Party, and the Civil War itself. In the book’s early chapters, Suval describes how squatters transitioned from figures of scorn to veneration. In the early republic, most Federalists abhorred squatters for intruding on public land they envisioned as a future source of revenue for nation building. With the rise of Jackson, many elites promoted squatters as a cost-effective means to clear land for future settlements. Democratic politicians promoted pre-emption legislation that worked in conjunction with Indian removal policies, ensuring that White men would dominate Jacksonian Democracy and the American West itself. Even the Whig Party, founded in opposition to Jackson’s policies, had to embrace squatterism or perish at the polls. Chapters four and five describe how squatters in the 1830s and 1840s drove the national agenda. The Anglo-Americans who entered Texas and Oregon occupied land outside of U.S. public domain, risking potential conflict with Indigenous communities as well as Mexico and Great Britain. The Polk administration backed these squatters by annexing Texas, claiming Oregon via treaty, and invading Mexico. By 1848, U.S. possessions extended to the Pacific Ocean. Suval cites the acquisition of Oregon Territory and passage of the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act as the “high water mark of Squatter Democracy” (p. 113). Indeed, in Oregon (and later Kansas), squatters successfully claimed land before the federal government extinguished Indigenous title, a violation of U.S. legal precedent. Yet Oregon’s status as a free territory represented a turning point, as pro-slavery Democrats realized they had created a monster they could no longer control. The book’s final chapters chronicle the dis-integration of the squatter-statesman alliance. While southern elites hoped newly acquired California would legalize slavery, the scores of antislavery squatters who entered the region to claim Mexican land had different plans. Sectional temperatures rose further in 1854 when Stephen A. Douglas proposed popular sovereignty in Kansas, allowing squatters to decide the issue of slavery for themselves at the polls. The result was a violent clash between pro-and anti-slavery forces, triggering a backlash against what detractors [End Page 98] called “squatter sovereignty.” Unable to reach a compromise on slavery in western territories, the Democratic Party soon split along sectional lines and all but guaranteed the election of Abraham Lincoln and southern secession. Dangerous Grounds is an extensively researched, convincingly argued, and readable political history with a fascinating dash of cultural history. Readers of this journal will be particularly interested that Suval makes the U.S. colonization of Oregon a key moment in his narrative. The book might have been strengthened by more robust discussions of property rights and democracy itself. Indeed, Suval’s use of the upper-case Democracy in the title and elsewhere is somewhat confusing. By “Democracy,” Suval does not refer to a system in which the masses...

The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells

Reviewed by: The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War by Jonathan Daniel Wells Frank Towers (bio) The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery, and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War. Jonathan Daniel Wells. New York: Bold Type Books, 2020. ISBN 978-1568587523. 368 pp., cloth, $30.00. In recent years, historians have produced a wave of studies on the kidnapping and reenslavement of African Americans before the Civil War. Richard Bell, Erica Dunbar, Caleb McDaniel, Adam Rothman, and Joshua Rothman among others have shed light on the cruelty, pervasiveness, and legal complexity of kidnapping. They have also told stories of heroic resistance against the depraved pursuit of profit through stealing Northern Blacks from their homes to sell them in Southern slave markets. Adding to this scholarship, Jonathan Wells’s gripping history of kidnapping in 1830s New York exposes the proslavery underbelly of America’s largest city. At its core, The Kidnapping Club is a story of the battle for freedom in the ante-bellum North, a section that despite its ban on slavery denied African Americans basic civil liberties. Led by “the indomitable” Black activist David Ruggles, Black New Yorkers waged a long struggle against kidnappers and their powerful allies in local government. Wells argues that white New York’s complicity in kidnapping went beyond a few corrupt cops and judges. Wall Street financiers facilitated kidnapping to appease Southern slave owners, whose cotton comprised one of the most valuable commodities traded through New York. Because of this obeisance to the South, “it sometimes seemed that the entire city, knowing that its richness and supremacy depended on Southern slavery, was more interested in reassuring slaveholders than in protecting the basic human rights of its Black residents” (5). The Kidnapping Club begins by backgrounding the growth of New York as a gathering place for African Americans as well as the center of American finance and commerce, which drew much of its capital from trading slave-produced cotton. Black New Yorkers lived under a system of “strict racial segregation” that affected “nearly every aspect” of their lives (27). To thrive in a city that tried to [End Page 106] suppress them, they built their own businesses and institutions such as schools, churches, orphanages, and newspapers such as Freedom’s Journal, which exposed racial injustices. Preying on this growing community was a ring of kidnappers whose key players included police marshal and notorious Democratic Party brawler Isaiah Rynders, who worked with Southern slave traders to identify suspected fugitives; police officers Tobias Boudinot and Daniel Nash, who arrested suspected freedom seekers from the South; and City Recorder Richard Riker, who routinely ruled in favor of slave catchers in cases of alleged fugitives. These officials abused their authority by condemning Black defendants to enslavement despite compelling evidence to the contrary brought by Ruggles and his allies. The kidnappers had close ties to Tammany Hall—the informal name for the city’s branch of the Democratic Party—which relied on patronage from Wall Street businessmen to fund its campaigns. Helping Southern slave traders not only earned these men cash bribes and bounties, it also “cemented the economic relationship between cotton growers and Manhattan brokers” (45). To combat these powerful foes, Ruggles worked with other abolitionists to organize the New York Committee of Vigilance in 1835. The committee spread word when slave catchers were in town, gave sanctuary for freedom seekers, provided legal defense for accused fugitives, and waged a public pressure campaign against the kidnappers. Leading these efforts, Ruggles routinely risked his personal safety to confront police and rescue victims. This outspoken leadership made Ruggles a target of the kidnappers who physically assaulted him and tried to frame him for a crime. Meanwhile, Ruggles’s combativeness made him enemies within the Committee of Vigilance. Losing his eyesight and exhausted by fighting friends as well as foes, Ruggles left New York in 1841. Around this time, the kidnapping club went into decline. An 1840 law requiring jury trials in fugitive cases took away corrupt judges’ power to convict. Two years later, Riker died and Boudinot declared bankruptcy. Instead of ending the story at this point, Wells moves to the...

Race Unequals: Overseer Contracts, White Masculinities, and the Formation of Managerial Identity in the Plantation Economy

Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb's Race Unequals presents a history of the plantation overseer in the American South in the two decades before the Civil War. Complicating “a society polarized by race, White people against Black people,” Race Unequals makes two key contributions (p. xii). First, it looks to an understudied but generative site in the plantation economy, that of the relationships between the wealthiest slave owners and the men they paid as wage earners. As a legal history highlighting how their conflicts played out in courtrooms, in legislatures, and on the ground, Race Unequals also foregrounds intraracial class conflict among whites that, crucially, also shaped the lives of the enslaved. McMurtry-Chubb concludes that overseers occupied a vexed position, more complicated and illuminating than historians have recognized. Because overseers labored to enforce the slave economy while also working as subordinates within it, Race Unequals argues that they are useful for understanding the formation of “managerial identity” in the plantation economy (pp. iii–iv). The book draws conclusions primarily on the plantation economy, but as its epilogue on the “legacy” of plantation management suggests, historians might well wonder about its lessons for American history as a whole.

More Relevant Than Ever

Anton de Kom was an anticolonial thinker, resistance fighter, father, author, and poet—a renaissance man par excellance born in the Dutch colony Suriname. In his Wij slaven van Suriname (1934), De Kom, as a descendant of enslaved peoples in Suriname, described with razor-sharpness the oppression and exploitation of people on the basis of “race” and class, both during the period of slavery and after its abolition. Although he became known as a national hero in Suriname, in the former colonial metropole of the Netherlands his name, work, and life story were relatively unknown. In 2020, however, Wij slaven became a bestseller, eighty-six years after its original publication, and De Kom became part of the Dutch canon. This essay explores this new, even unexpected, “success” of Wij slaven, and indeed of Anton de Kom, within the Dutch public and political spheres.

Foundations by Karin Speedy

Reviewed by: Foundations by Karin Speedy Heather Goodall Foundations. By Karin Speedy. Lower Hutt: Karin Speedy, 2022. This is an engaging and evocative work of creative non-fiction. Karin Speedy has cryptically described it in her cover notes as a “memoir/literary nonfiction novel.” The book depicts episodes of her life—at different ages—and intersperses them with her analyses of the situations she was researching. This is certainly memoir, but Speedy takes us further, disrupting chronological progressions with juxtaposition, shifting narrative voices and contrasting styles. This agility allows Speedy’s book to remain lucid and accessible while it draws the reader in. Foundations tells at least four stories, weaving them together so they are in conversation—sometimes disturbingly, often movingly—with each other. One story is a family history, across a number of generations of migrancy and colonialism, told through the eyes of Speedy as a young person growing up within a difficult family relationship in Auckland, Aotearoa. Beyond this troubled nuclear family, there is her far longer genealogical search across the myths and secrets which so often shroud settler family histories. Only on the final pages—and after the penultimate book manuscript had been completed—do we, and the author herself, learn a key fact which offers an answer to one of these family myths. That long family history is related to the second major narrative of this book, which is the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand—the invasion and then the theft of whenua—Māori land—through military force and the deceptive versions of the Waitangi treaty. This Aotearoa colonial history necessitates telling part of the story of British colonialism in Australia and across the Pacific, although most attention is on Aotearoa. Yet another major narrative is about the French empire, itself a fragmented story with many foci. In this book, one focus is on the colonies in the Pacific, particularly Kanaky New Caledonia where Speedy has researched, but also Tahiti. Another focus is on the colonies near the east coast of Africa—Reunion and Mauritius. A third is on the colonies in the Americas, both in Canada and in Louisiana. Most of these French colonies have Indigenous, settler and enslaved populations—with African enslaved people transferred to the Americas, the Indian Ocean and, post-emancipation, to the Pacific colonies as well—and with metropolitan France intervening in the interactions between each population in and between each colony. The second and third of these stories—the colonial history of Aotearoa to the present and the entangled histories of colonies and metropole in the French Empire—open up challenges for readers who, like me, are historians working largely within one empire. I have looked at very different colonies within the British Empire, namely Australia and India, as well as exploring the tensions between the diverse and often conflicting groups within each of those colonies. And because there are such complex situations to explore, even within any colony, it has been tempting to work only on one empire. My recent work, published as Beyond Borders: Indians, Australians and the Indonesian Revolution, 1939–1950 (2019), forced me to gain a much better grasp of Dutch colonialism, and the bitter decolonisation of the Netherlands East Indies. I was disturbed to realise how little I had known about the Dutch Empire, despite the geographic proximity of the Netherlands East Indies to Australia; despite the conflicts, in which Australians had been involved, in South Africa between the British and the formerly Dutch settlers, known as Boers, in the Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century and, finally, despite the Dutch retreat to Australia during the Japanese invasion from 1942 to 1945 and beyond. Recognising Australia’s place as a South Pacific Island—as I work on the relationships between First Nations people, including Indigenous Australians, in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific campaign—I have paid much more active attention to the French Empire. Here my knowledge has proved to be even less adequate than in relation to the Dutch colonial impact. One dimension of my failure to know more about the histories of both Dutch and French colonialism has been my monolingualism—and the false sense of confidence...

Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, 1660–1783

In this fascinating book, Lee B. Wilson argues (against popular and scholarly perception alike) for the existence of an English common law of slavery. Or, perhaps more accurately, that the English common law proved malleable enough to incorporate slavery. The common assumption that slave law had to be imported from foreign jurisdictions, Wilson argues, is flatly wrong. To prove her case, Wilson analyzes the South Carolinian legal system from the colonial era to the early republic. Instead of focusing on the proscriptive slave codes borrowed from Barbados and elsewhere, she examines property law, commercial transactions, vice-admiralty courts, equity jurisdiction, and the law of police. She consistently finds that English law provided a more-than-adequate framework for the incorporation of slavery. Property law was adapted in the colonial context quite readily. The Royal African Company treated enslaved people as goods and merchandise, and early laws in New York and South Carolina followed suit. There was some legal wrangling over whether to treat enslaved people as real or moveable property in the eighteenth century. In South Carolina, lack of legislative guidance led plantation owners and merchants to adopt the chattel principle by custom.

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

How Far Does the Diverse Economies Approach Take Us?

To Be is to Dream is to Be Free

Malone talks back to the legacy of exploitation of Black slave labor and the system of racial subjugation and sexual political economy that places demands on the Black female body, themes that are found in Alison Saar’s artwork entitled Cotton Eater II (2014).

A Shoal on a New Shore: Afro-Indigeneity and Multilingualism in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

In the eight sections of her 2008 book-length poem Zong!, Afro-Canadian poet NourbeSe Philip breaks apart the representational, colonialist, and objectifying language of an archived insurance document, repurposes it, and transforms it into poetry that establishes new methods of reading that resist the semantic logic of slavery's necropolitical archive. While many critics focus on the de(con)structive nature of Philip's response to the murder of 133 enslaved persons at sea, I assert that Zong! is ultimately an antinomian text of recovery and reconstruction by virtue of her inclusion of multiple Indigenous African tongues. In doing so, I turn to Tiffany Lethabo King's exploration of the “shoal”—a liminal spot of convergence between the sea and land that connects the Black Atlantic to Indigenous violence—to establish that Zong! is more than a text of the Black Atlantic. Through the inclusion of thirteen Afro-Indigenous languages, I argue that Philip creates a convergence between the Black Atlantic and Indigeneity, in a new Afro-Indigenous shoal. This expands King's shoal to the shores of Africa, demonstrating that these multiethnic convergences exceed an Americanist approach.

Conrad's Maw: The Buried Histories of Costaguana

Abstract: This essay examines how the legacy of slavery in Joseph Conrad's Nostromo affects narrative temporality and, consequently, the novel's conception of imperial history and extractive futurity. I argue that Sulaco's attempts to forget the San Tomé mine's reliance on the labor of enslaved persons during the era of the Spanish empire results in an ahistorical proto-nationalist mythmaking. Consequently, Sulaco's attempts to declare independence from the Republic of Costaguana subordinate the province even more deeply to imperial capital, trading a pale semblance of self-determination for a massive expansion of the local resource extraction operation guarded by the American military. Through these events, Emilia Gould, the mine chief's wife, emerges as the figure who most profoundly understands the connection between the mined silver ore and the imperial world system in which the province's people and the mine uneasily coexist. In a novel notably devoid of reproductive futurity or eros of almost any kind, the Occidental Republic of Sulaco exploits Emilia Gould's imperial femininity by casting her as the mother figure of the new nation.

:The Making of a Roman Imperial Estate: Archaeology in the Vicus at Vagnari, Puglia

:<i>The Making of a Roman Imperial Estate: Archaeology in the Vicus at Vagnari, Puglia</i>

Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Lindsay A. Silver Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. America in the Nineteenth Century. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x, 284. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5339-9.) In Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, Erin Austin Dwyer insightfully demonstrates how emotions shaped, maintained, and challenged the institution of slavery by examining the power dynamics of real and performative feelings between people who were enslaved and slave owners. At the same time, Dwyer emphasizes the prominence of emotions in proslavery defenses and abolitionist critiques, further underscoring the centrality of sentiments to many of the arguments seeking to uphold or destroy slavery in antebellum America. As a book about the power of emotions and feelings, Mastering Emotions primarily focuses on relationships between enslaved people and slaveholders. Dwyer draws on a wide variety of sources while making particular use of first-person accounts. These sources, which include slave narratives alongside the journals and diaries of white southerners who owned enslaved people, enable Dwyer to expose and explore the feelings and emotions that established, maintained, and even challenged the power dynamics within slavery. Dwyer’s work is deeply rooted in an extensive historiography of American slavery that acknowledges the prevalence of such sentiments among enslaved Blacks and slaveholding whites. What stands out about Mastering Emotions is that Dwyer is the first to seriously and methodically analyze the significance of feelings and emotions to the institution of slavery. Dwyer accomplishes this goal by applying the framework established by scholars of the history of emotions to the history of American slavery. As a result, the reader revisits many familiar scenes and stories from nineteenth-century narratives of enslaved people and slaveholders, but with a new understanding of how power dynamics operated between them, due to Dwyer’s emphasis on the importance of emotions in these relationships. Mastering Emotions covers considerable ground, examining a number of emotions from multiple angles and perspectives. Dwyer successfully demonstrates how the roles of enslaved persons and slave owners were culturally constructed, learned, reinforced, and challenged through emotions both real and performative. Included in the wide range of emotions Dwyer examines are trust, happiness, fear, and the enjoyment of freedom. In her discussion of fear and punishment, the author highlights how scholars have traditionally focused on physical punishment inflicted on enslaved people and have ignored or downplayed the role of emotional or affective discipline. By shifting the focus away from physical punishment and examining the role of emotions, Dwyer successfully demonstrates a greater understanding of “the lived experience of slavery and . . . the critical place of emotional mastery in discipline” (p. 139). Additionally, Dwyer exposes the contradictions in proslavery literature that argued that enslaved people did not have the capacity to feel emotions as strongly as white people, even as emotional punishments designed to break up enslaved families became a common form of control—one that enslaved people often felt was much more painful than physical violence. [End Page 142] In order to fully demonstrate the significance, power, and legacy of the emotional politics of slavery, Dwyer concludes with a brief but important overview of how emotions have shaped Black and white race relations in America since emancipation. In doing so, Dwyer outlines how different emotions, particularly fear, have tragically impacted the joys of freedom for Black Americans from the Jim Crow era to the present. Importantly, Dwyer’s conclusion makes a strong case for further academic and cultural work to better understand the power dynamics of emotions within race relations since the abolition of slavery more than 150 years ago. Lindsay A. Silver Texas A&M University–San Antonio Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland

Reviewed by: All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 by Jeff Strickland William D. Jones All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849. By Jeff Strickland. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 276. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-108-71691-8.) Jeff Strickland has written an excellent account of a little-known slave rebellion that took place in the public workhouse of Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1849. Some twenty enslaved people fought and defeated the guards of the workhouse and engineered the escape of thirty-seven people imprisoned there. The inciting event occurred in the morning, when an enslaved man named Nicholas and some allies defended an unnamed enslaved woman from a slave trader, who had arrived at the workhouse to retrieve her for medical treatment and eventual sale. The jailers and city authorities were slow to respond, providing Nicholas and others with time to organize and arm themselves with tools. Though white militiamen captured most of the escapees within hours of the uprising, and the Charleston Courts of Magistrates and Freeholders tried and executed Nicholas and other accused leaders two days later, the rebellion at the workhouse influenced local politics. Strickland argues that the incident encouraged jail and policing reforms, raised nativist fears, and led enslavers to further question the position of the church in a slave society. He also contends that the city annexed the Charleston Neck because of the rebellion, since the new workhouse in the Neck became the only place [End Page 144] for Charleston enslavers to imprison enslaved people while the old one was under renovation. Strickland weaves together two strands of historical analysis. On the one hand, he contextualizes the 1849 workhouse rebellion, understanding it as a product of the workhouse conditions, urban enslavement, and the revolutionary thought that circulated in the Atlantic world. To understand the rebellion, he contends, the reader must also understand the highly policed nature of urban enslavement and the place of the workhouse in Charleston’s system of racial slavery. Charleston enslavers sent enslaved people to the workhouse to be whipped. Authorities imprisoned fugitive enslaved people there. The work-house was also on the site of the city’s slave market, so slave traders often confined people in it before and after sale. Other elements important to nineteenth-century southern history, including revolutionary rhetoric, slave rebellions, and the domestic slave trade, are likewise important to the story of this uprising. On the other hand, readers must understand who Nicholas was, and Strickland provides the best biography of the rebellion’s leader possible. Born enslaved, Nicholas at a young age fell into the hands of William Kelly, a plasterer, who trained Nicholas in his trade and often hired him out to others. When Nicholas was a young adult in the mid-1840s, Kelly left Charleston for New Orleans and took the people he enslaved to Louisiana with him. There, Kelly allowed Nicholas latitude in his labor arrangements, so much so that when Kelly returned to South Carolina, he left Nicholas behind to continue his lucrative work. After Kelly discovered that Nicholas was withholding the wages he earned in New Orleans, the enslaver transported him back to Charleston against his will. As Kelly tried to sell Nicholas there, the enslaved man resisted a search of his body and assaulted an employee of a slave trader, which landed Nicholas in the workhouse. Strickland’s accessible prose, narrative style, and comprehensive contextualization mix well with his fascinating and enlightening analyses of the workhouse and urban enslavement. All for Liberty: The Charleston Workhouse Slave Rebellion of 1849 will be excellent to teach with. As contemporary public rhetoric emphasizes prison and policing reform, the intertwined histories of the enslavement and the incarceration of Black people that Strickland depicts is as revelatory as it is harrowing. For as much as All for Liberty has to say about the nineteenth-century United States, the story of the 1849 workhouse rebellion may have even more to say about the country today. William D. Jones Rice University Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association