African Slaves Research Articles

Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Ottoman Court, written by Betül İpşirli Argıt The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker, written by Jane Hathaway

Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage, and the Imperial Ottoman Court, written by Betül İpşirli Argıt The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker, written by Jane Hathaway

Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Critical Insights: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

A Miskitu Critique of British Trade Practices

A Miskitu Critique of British Trade Practices

What Did Medieval Slavery Look Like? Color, Race, and Unfreedom in Later Medieval Iberia

This article asks what medieval images can reveal about the realities of race and slavery in the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. It examines a group of elite manuscripts in which enslaved people consistently are depicted by means of a Black stereotype despite the relative rarity of sub-Saharan African slaves in those kingdoms at this time, positing that these images functioned not literally, but metaphorically and metonymically, to suggest how the state of unfreedom intersected with transculturally dominant ideas about morality, soteriology, and religious and social norms, as well as racial difference. Emerging at a moment of aggressive Christian expansion into al-Andalus and the introduction of newly enslaved Muslims into societies where their free co-religionists had already lived for some time, the images should be seen a trenchant visual response that, rather than merely recording what late medieval Iberian slavery “looked like,” leveraged racially charged color symbolism to articulate the cultural, social, and moral differences believed to mark the enslaved in medieval Iberian society.

The Neapolitan Enlightenment and the Conceptual Challenges of Antislavery Legislation in Colombia.

This article studies the connected history of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, Spanish American colonial culture, and republican antislavery. Rather than adopting novel abolitionist paradigms wholesale, Colombia's antislavery legislators resorted to old ideas and convictions. Antislavery legal formulations did not diverge from Spanish culture, adapting long-existing Mediterranean notions instead. Legislators turned to the figure of the Christian captive as the spiritual equivalent of the African slave, making legible, and possible, republican manumission as an act of pious redemption. Under pressure from slave claimants, Colombian antislavery legislators passed a gradual manumission law in 1814, selectively applying Gaetano Filangieri's celebrated Science of legislation.

The Influence of Reparations, Internalized Oppression, and Racial Centrality Across Systemic and Psychological Factors Concerning the African American Community

The purpose of this paper was to utilize the literature to better understand how reparations have a causal effect on, (a) internalized oppression; (b) racial centrality; (c) systemic inequity; and (d) mental health outcomes within the African American community. Reparations are examined through both monetary gains and the significance of societal recognition of the history of African chattel slavery. In addition, the White versus African American wealth gap is utilized to display the relationship between unpaid reparations and contemporary economic oppression. The findings illustrate the causal effects of unpaid reparations that were demonstrated throughout the literature to have negative consequences on the African American community. Moreover, a direct link was found between unpaid reparations and negative economic mobility, mental health outcomes, internalized oppression, and decreased racial centrality. Finally, the findings also show the benefits reparations would have on the descendants of African slaves, which were increased racial centrality, decreased internalized oppression, and systemic recognition, as well as positively impacting future generations. Therefore, the effects would impact the entire African American community, through increasing generational wealth and equity.

Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

The globalization of pipes and smoking in the early modern world is often thought of as a linear movement from the Americas to Africa and Eurasia. While this is true of tobacco smoking, other early modern cultures of smoking (such as the use of cannabis pipes) diffused from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, not from the Americas. This article traces the technological, linguistic, and cultural translations of smoking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the Atlantic world. These movements provoked significant new questions. Early modern smokers (and their critics) grappled with the question of how pipes and other “pyric technologies” of elemental transformation interacted with the body and mind—and with debates about racialized theories of health, long-distance travel, the African slave trade, and the translatability of knowledge and habits.

An Enslaver's Guide to Slavery Reform: William Dunlop's 1690 Proposals to Christianize Slaves in the British Atlantic

When it was first brought to light in 2010, an anonymously authored, unpublished document from 1690, Proposals for the propagating of the Christian Religion, and Converting of Slaves whether Negroes or Indians in the English plantations, appeared to support claims for an emerging humanitarian sensibility among Christian antislavery reformers in seventeenth-century England. This article argues that Scottish Covenanter, colonizer, and enslaver William Dunlop was the author of these proposals. Dunlop's authorship casts them in a new light, showing the complex ways Christianity and slavery were entangled in this period and the challenges Reformed Protestants faced in their attempts to disentangle them. Dunlop's Reformed background and experience in the Presbyterian resistance movement during the “killing times” of the early 1680s led him to view slavery as anti-Christian tyranny and liberty as the will of God. But during his time in Carolina he was deeply implicated in enslaving illegally seized Christian Indian captives, African chattel slaves, white indentured servants seeking freedom in Spanish Catholic Florida, and even fellow Covenanters banished to the plantations for their resistance to episcopacy. Dunlop's proposals emerged from these dual contexts. They tried and failed to imagine a form of Christian slavery that gave enough freedom to enslaved people to lead authentic Christian lives, showing instead that Christianity and slavery were incompatible and offering reformers only a stark choice: not Christian slavery, but Christianity or slavery.

Childhood in Captivity: Bioarchaeological Evidence from a Late Colonial Sugar Plantation in Central Peru

Children and childhood have emerged as important topics for understanding the history of African slavery in the Americas. In historical archaeology, analyses of subadult skeletal remains have provided valuable information about the biological and social conditions of captivity, yet children are infrequently the primary subjects of study in African diaspora bioarchaeology. Recent bioarchaeological research at Hacienda La Quebrada, a late colonial sugar plantation in central Peru, brings new data to bear on these subjects. Excavations at the cemetery for the plantation's enslaved African and Afro-descendant population recovered 158 subadults ranging from newborns to 20 years old, who represented 64% of the burial sample. Paleodemographic data and skeletal indicators of stress indicate that enslaved children were disproportionately affected by the conditions of life at Hacienda La Quebrada, particularly because of insufficient diets and susceptibility to infection and disease. Although these results are specific to the context of plantation slavery in Peru's coastal sugar economy, they contribute new information about the history of African slavery in Peru and about the study of childhood in conditions of captivity and colonialism in the Spanish Americas more broadly.

Victims or Victors? The Challenges of Launching a Black American Muslim Conference

ABSTRACT This study combines participant observation and textual analysis conducted over a multi-year period. It analyzes the Black American Muslim Conference’s (BAMC) establishment of an annual forum for addressing issues pertinent to the descendants of African slaves in the United States practicing normative Sunni Islam. When announced, it faced backlash for its delimitations of Black American Muslims as an imagined community inheriting an ethnographically distinct theological legacy. A flood of contestations appeared on social media claiming the conference was divisive, irreligious, and racist. Repeatedly challenged on what bound them as an imagined community, organisers were compelled into clarifying the conference’s scope in exchanges on social media while maintaining their expressed inclusivity. The successive conferences have repeatedly struggled to gain wide support from Muslim organisations. Recurring panels have navigated polarisation by balancing individualist and collectivist themes while maintaining weariness towards endorsing victimhood or Uncle Tom narratives.

HF01-03 SMALLPOX VACCINATION: A PHYSICIAN, A MINISTER AND AN AFRICAN SLAVE WIN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 May 2022HF01-03 SMALLPOX VACCINATION: A PHYSICIAN, A MINISTER AND AN AFRICAN SLAVE WIN THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR Joseph Hartnett, and Howard Adler Joseph HartnettJoseph Hartnett More articles by this author , and Howard AdlerHoward Adler More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000002541.03AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The practice of smallpox inoculation dates back to the 1500s in China and India. It became common in Europe, but was not utilized in the American colonies until the 1700s due to fear. The practice was successfully adopted during the smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721. Over 50 years later, George Washington ordered mass inoculation of the Continental Army as smallpox was seen as a greater threat than the British Army. METHODS: A literature search was performed using Pub Med and Google on smallpox vaccination and the American Revolution. RESULTS: The city of Boston experienced a severe smallpox epidemic from the spring of 1721 to the winter of 1722. Over 6,000 cases and 850 deaths were reported in the population of approximately 11,000 people. Cotton Mather was a Puritan Minister who learned of smallpox inoculation (variolation) from his West African slave Onesimus, writing, “he told me that he had undergone the operation which had given something of the smallpox and would forever preserve him from it, adding that was often used in West Africa.” When the Boston smallpox epidemic arrived, he urged the medical community to inoculate the Boston community. Most physicians opposed the intervention based on religious grounds as well as scientific uncertainty. However, Zabdiel Boylston, the first American surgeon of the English colonies in North America (having performed the first operation for bladder stones and a breast tumor in the colonies) brought smallpox inoculation to the city of Boston. After demonstrating a reduction in death rate from 14.8% to 2%, many of the skeptics changed their opinion. Despite this experience in Boston and the experience with variolation in Europe, fear of the process remained. In 1776, the Continental Congress issued a proclamation prohibiting surgeons to inoculate the army. During the Revolutionary War, most British troops were immune to smallpox. In contrast, 90% of Continental Army deaths were due to disease with smallpox being the most common. In 1777, General Washington ordered mass inoculation of the Continental Army explaining, “Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army...we should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy." Despite a lack of surgeons and supplies, the mass inoculation was successful. There were isolated infections, but no regiment was incapacitated. CONCLUSIONS: Smallpox inoculation saved many lives all over the world. Mandated inoculation was essential to the successful victory of the American colonies during the American Revolution. Source of Funding: n/a © 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 207Issue Supplement 5May 2022Page: e212 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Joseph Hartnett More articles by this author Howard Adler More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF DownloadLoading ...

Primeira circum-navegação brasileira e primeira missão do Brasil à China (1879)

When considering transpacific relations between Asia and Latin America, scholars have begun to pay closer attention to the centuries-long historical connections between China and Brazil. The global circulation of goods, people, natural resources, and ideas between Brazil and China began in the early sixteenth century when Portuguese explorers, in competition with other European empires to find the quickest oceanic routes to the silk and spice trade, connected a global trade network that linked port cities in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The nineteenth-century history of China-Brazil relations had a contingent relationship to earlier histories of the movement in human labor, goods, languages, cultures, and concepts. In Brazil, the gradual end of African slavery led many intellectuals, politicians, and agriculturalists to look to China for possibilities of setting up new trade networks and Chinese contract labor as a possible substitution for slave labor. These economic concerns were entangled with visions of Brazilian political modernity and debates about how the colonial empire could enter the world stage as a modern republican state.Journalist Marli Cristina Scomazzon and coauthor Jeff Franco make a significant contribution to this critical and volatile period in Brazilian political and economic history. Their book, Primeira circum-navegação brasileira e primeira missão do Brasil à China (1879), details the Brazilian Navy's first trip around the world and the first Brazilian mission to China. The book is sponsored by the Brazilian Navy's Department of Publication and Dissemination and endorsed by José Carlos Mathias, vice admiral and director of historical patrimony and documentation of the Navy, and Pierre Paulo da Cunha Castro, captain of sea and war, who author the book's prologue and preface, respectively. Organized like a navy museum exhibition catalog with a patriotic tone, the book provides an exposition of the global voyage of the corvette Vital de Oliveira, which circumnavigated the world in 430 days from November 19, 1879, to January 21, 1881. The book's two main parts follow the circumnavigation route of the Vital de Oliveira. The first part is further subdivided according to a list of the port cities, regions, and countries where the corvette made stops, including Gibraltar, France, Malta, Egypt, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Singapore, China, Japan, the United States, Mexico, Chile, Patagonia, and Uruguay. The second part exhibits archival materials about the first Brazilian delegation to China. The book's organization and methodology reconstruct a military history about the two main goals of the Brazilian Navy for the trip around the world: to provide professional instruction on long sea voyages, and to fulfill a diplomatic mission in China with the intent to “buscar mão de obra chinesa para substituição do trabalho escravo no Brasil” (p. 39). The sections of the first part largely retrace the voyage through providing dates and times of departure and arrival, followed by long citations of the travel writings from people aboard the warship or accounts printed contemporaneously in Brazilian newspapers. The book is composed of a diverse archive of illustrations, musical scores, European and Chinese diplomatic missives, photographs, and passenger lists, but the book's archive is compiled from an uneven grouping of sources, ranging from personal souvenirs and national archives to portraits of Qing officials taken from Wikipedia. The second part of the book is dedicated to the first Brazilian diplomatic mission to China and is similarly organized according to the cities that the delegation visited. The sections include long quotations taken from Brazilian diplomatic writings or Brazilian newspapers, which are presented as facts without questioning the politics of the newspapers, journalists, travel writers, or diplomatic perspectives. These shortcomings need not be limitations since the book presents many interesting details when approached with caution and a critical lens. It will be of interest to historians in general and opens opportunities for further research on the long and connected histories of China and Brazil.

Learning about a Woman Queen in Africa: Njinga (1583-1663) as an Ecological Human Rights Defender and a Sister Against Turbulent Times of Racism and War: An Ecolinguistic Study

Njinga (1582 Ndongo-December 1663 Matamba) was a female black warrior from the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms of the Mbundu people known as Angola today where Portuguese is the official language of communication. She was criticized for assisting the Portuguese, being a cannibal, and contributing to the African slave trade. She could speak several languages. She was the daughter of King Kiluanji. However, according to a movie on her, she freed her country from Portuguese invaders during the turbulent times of war and racism, leading to slavery (see Graciano (director of the movie), 2013). In this study, her representations as a good strategist and a politician in the movie directed by Graciano (2013) and in the comics on her prepared and published by UNESCO (comic strip text by Serbin and Joubeaud, 2014) will be compared from an ecocritical point of view as slavery and mining are also means of nature devastation, leading to turbulent times of pandemics, discrimination, and wars. Arran Stibbe’s (2015 and 2021) ecological discourse analysis strategies will be used to divide sentences on Njinga’s acts into three categories as those related to (1) destructive discourse, (2) ambivalent discourse, and (3) beneficial discourse in relation to environmental ethics, keeping in mind the Halliday’s (1994) three language “metafunctions” categorized as (a) “ideational,” (d) “interpersonal,” and (c) “textual” (as cited in Gong and Liu, 2018).

Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies by Anna Suranyi

Reviewed by: Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies by Anna Suranyi Nicole K. Dressler Indentured Servitude: Unfree Labour and Citizenship in the British Colonies. By Anna Suranyi. States, People, and the History of Social Change. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2021. 292 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. The role of indentured servitude was central to critical debates concerning state building, capitalist development, and the nature of unfreedom in the British Atlantic world. In the 1940s, Abbott Emerson Smith and Richard B. Morris conducted key studies on white colonial servitude with special attention to servants' legal and socioeconomic conditions.1 Especially since the 1980s, historians have made great strides in advancing understandings of indentured servants, convict servants, and redemptioners, revealing important demographic and economic data and uncovering illuminating accounts of servants' lived realities. Scholars have also examined the transition from indentured servitude to the brutal, perpetual, and racialized practice of African chattel slavery that burgeoned in the eighteenth century.2 Though African slavery was unequivocally unlike other forms of bound labor because of the chattel principle, recent historians have increasingly studied servitude on a continuum of unfreedom, illuminating the complexity of labor, race, and coercion in the British Atlantic.3 Anna Suranyi's Indentured Servitude builds on this scholarship by encouraging readers to understand servitude as a critical element in the conceptualization of citizenship in the early British Atlantic world. Above all, Suranyi seeks to show the widening distinctions in legal categories of servitude and slavery by addressing how indentured servants influenced notions of participatory membership in the body politic over the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Though historians have long debated the periodization and transition from servitude to slavery, Suranyi challenges the long-held contention that Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676 was the major impetus encouraging [End Page 350] colonists to distance categories of servitude from slavery.4 Instead, she argues that "from the beginning of the seventeenth century, colonial governments as well as settler communities strove to delineate servants and enslaved people, not only to define divergent forms of labour bondage but also to define different categories of people" (9). Though early English subjects did not understand their roles as "participatory citizens" the way they would come to in the mid-eighteenth century, she shows how in the seventeenth century they viewed "themselves as rights-bearing individuals" (14). This status entailed maintaining certain social responsibilities and entitlement to some privileges, such as voting and jury participation. The clarification of servants' legal rights—which, for example, allowed them to request courts to hear their complaints and seek redress for legal wrongs—vitally informed developing ideas of citizenship in the British Empire. Suranyi begins by outlining how people became servants—sometimes voluntarily, other times not. As David W. Galenson, Hilary McD. Beckles, and others have noted, economic interests were a key motive in expanding unfree labor.5 Many of the poor servants who went to the Americas often signed fixed-term contracts. England's royalist and parliamentary governments alike viewed banishment and such tenures of servitude as a means to remove the poor, criminals, rebels, and others deemed undesirable from local communities, at one stroke reducing the costs of imprisonment and populating the colonies. With the Transportation Act of 1718, moreover, English authorities widened and institutionalized the punishment of transportation, sentencing certain criminals to seven or fourteen years of banishment. Shippers and merchants sold many in this position as convict servants in the American colonies. Government-sponsored contractors, as well as those who transported people as servants illegally—"spirits" (xi), as these career kidnappers were called—found that shipping these unfree laborers was quite profitable. The increasing practice of forced indentures ushered in [End Page 351] critical debates on labor and coercion while unsettling comparisons of temporary servitude with African chattel slavery. Concurrently, this discourse prompted broader and crucial discussions on the meaning of rights for freeborn Britons. Using an array of court records, legal documents, fictionalized narratives, and servant accounts, Suranyi details the difficult, sometimes brutal, living circumstances servants faced in the colonies. Many found inadequate provisions, encountered neglect, and suffered vicious beatings. The majority landed in the Chesapeake, Barbados...

Race, Religion, and Slavery in Alonso de Sandoval’s S. J. De instauranda Aethiopum salute


 One of the most significant works on black slavery written by a Catholic thinker in the seventeenth century was Alonso de Sandoval’s De instauranda Aethiopum salute (1627/21647), which both describes the traffic of African slaves to Latin America and offers different clues to understanding the emergence of an ‘ideology’ of black slavery, which, to a certain extent, justified that system inside the Roman Catholic Church and the Iberian world. At the same time, Sandoval made an attempt to set up ethical criteria for the slave trade and the relationships between masters and slaves in the everyday life of the South American colonies. I propose an analysis of Sandoval's work focusing first on the theological foundations invoked for the slavery of black people, second on legal and moral debates over the justification of the enslaved condition of Africans and of the slave trade, and third on the roles of ‘race,’ ‘racism,’ and ‘true religion’ in Sandoval’s arguments. Sandoval introduces peculiar language and descriptions that deeply devaluate dark-skinned persons in general and African black culture in particular, supporting an ideology of subjection.

Borders and Betrayal in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: Rethinking Truths and Facts in the American Slave Narrative

Due to skepticism about authenticity, facts became a central trope in the American slave-narrative genre. Authors bolstered their credibility by emphasizing factual details about the barbarity of enslavement on Southern plantations. Based on interviews conducted with Cudjo Lewis, believed to be the last known surviving African slave in America, Zora Neale Hurston’s posthumously published Barracoon expands the slave narrative’s borders by unpacking the ramifications of transnational betrayal. Lewis’s harrowing memory of the African culprits who captured and sold him to white slave traders complicates the slave narrative’s adherence to facts. Although the transatlantic slave trade, created and operated by Europeans and Americans, was a greater evil than the slave-trading practices carried out by Africans, Lewis’s betrayal by his own African neighbours reveals an existential trauma often ignored by the facts of slave narratives. Barracoon is Hurston as her most subversive, choosing to explore the unresolved complications of a truthful lived experience instead of the clarifying comfort of contained facts.

A Tale of Two Coffee Colonies: Environment and Slavery in Suriname and Saint-Domingue, ca. 1750–1790

AbstractIn the second half of the eighteenth century, European metropolitan powers succeeded in overcoming the dominance that Yemen had hitherto exercised over the world coffee supply. Two colonies of the New World stood out in this transformation, both employing African slave labor on a large scale: Suriname, owned by the Dutch, and Saint-Domingue, the main French colony in the Caribbean. However, Suriname’s growth was short-lived, and it was soon surpassed by the productive leap of Saint-Domingue. The article explores the divergent trajectories of these two colonies, focusing on the environmental conditions of the operation of coffee plantations. Rather than taking the specific combinations of land, labor, capital, and political power as an independent and locally determined set, the article examines how the coffee trajectories of Suriname and Saint-Domingue were mutually formative through the specific evolving relationships that each space had within the world-system.

Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay by Shawn Michael Austin

Reviewed by: Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay by Shawn Michael Austin Barbara A. Ganson Colonial Kinship: Guaraní, Spaniards, and Africans in Paraguay. By Shawn Michael Austin. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2020. Pp. xvi, 382. $85.00. ISBN: 9780826361967.) Shawn Michael Austin in his exciting new book provides an insightful analysis into the everyday lives of the Guaraní through the study of colonial kinship in Paraguay. His focus is on those Native peoples who were subjected to labor demands and other obligations under the Spanish institution of the encomienda, as well as the African peoples and those of mixed descent who interacted with Spanish society, especially in Asuncion and its satellite communities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These Native peoples were generally under the control of Franciscan missionaries, although the author provides details on the Guaraní from the Jesuit missions to elucidate the divergent patterns of Native resistance and colonial practices. In contrast to previous works, Austin draws upon rich archival documents with emphasis on 350 judicial records, which have been underutilized, and often contain the testimonies of the Guaraní. The author uses a broad framework to demonstrate how ethnic soldiering first began with the Spanish expeditions into the Chaco region in search of precious metals in the sixteenth century, rather than with the arming of the Guaraní by the Jesuits to combat Indian slavery in the early seventeenth century. The Franciscans were also the first to evangelize among the Guaraní in Guairá in southeastern Brazil prior to the arrival of the first Jesuits in 1609 who became a major evangelical force in the region. Austin builds on the pioneering works (1954) of anthropologist Elman R. Service for his analysis on kinship to demonstrate how the Guaraní shaped Paraguayan colonial society. Spanish conquistadors relied on and exploited the kinship relations they established with the Guaraní before and well beyond the introduction of the encomienda and a tributary system in 1556. The author states that the Guaraní term mborayhu (loving) is a complex word that describes the Natives’ relationship with their encomenderos (grantees of Indian laborers), which implied reciprocal benefits and a sense of community. Austin further discusses how religious orders but especially the Jesuits were the major purchasers of African slaves in the Rio de la Plata who put their slaves to work on their ranches, farms, convents, and colleges. In 1682, he notes, Africans, whether enslaved or free, comprised [End Page 620] 15 percent of Asuncion’s population. Africans, the author convincingly argues, must be viewed within the context of indigenous society. The author mentions an absence of church records in Paraguay; however, a few original baptismal and marriage records from the colonial period, such as those of Mission Santa Rosa, remain in the archives of the churches themselves, rather than in Asuncion. Accordingly, one wonders about the extent to which grandparenthood ties took place between the Guaraní and African slaves, a pattern that was present in baptismal records in the church records of small towns in southeastern Brazil. The author’s analysis of African slavery in Paraguay is a major achievement, but perhaps he could have examined slavery in greater detail in other parts of the Rio de la Plata, such as Uruguay, to cast a broader framework to strengthen his analysis. Aside from these minor points, Austin’s work represents a major contribution to the history of the Guaraní and Spanish relations during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This informative book will be useful for scholars who study Spanish borderlands, ethnohistory, race mixture, and colonial Latin American history. Barbara A. Ganson Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Copyright © 2022 The Catholic University of America Press

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England by Elisabeth Ceppi

Reviewed by: Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England by Elisabeth Ceppi Richard A. Bailey (bio) Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service in Early New England Elisabeth Ceppi Dartmouth College Press, 2018. xiii + 276 pp. $95 cloth, $45 paperback Scholars have long described the New England colonies as marked by social hierarchy. From family life to church life to political life (both near and far), hierarchical relationships dominated the lives of New Englanders. Such hierarchies privileged certain segments of the colonial societies—especially whites and males. In Invisible Masters: Gender, Race, and the Economy of Service [End Page 220] in Early New England, Elisabeth Ceppi explores many of these privileged relationships, arguing that Puritan religious culture and New England economic culture were connected by currencies of obedient service, which included and made sense of the gendered and raced components of the covenant dialectic of New England. Reading the lives and experiences of New Englanders like Elizabeth Knapp, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, and Samson Occom alongside those of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, Ceppi presents a fresh look at the ways New Englanders of all sorts lived with the demands of their respective covenants. In order to demonstrate her readings of service in early New England, Ceppi begins with chapters that explore servitude within the "little commonwealth" (25) of the family, focusing particularly on the service rendered by children in colonial society. This "lived metaphor" (18) of the obedient child proves crucial to her treatment of the larger "Puritan project" (18). Her notion of "evangelical obedience" relies on the doctrines of humiliation and adoption (29). Once she establishes how these concepts factored into the concept of obedient service, Ceppi then sets out to show the various ways New England Puritans interpreted key biblical passages, such as the parable of the Prodigal Son. These passages informed the everyday relationships of authors like Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, both of whom fail to demonstrate true evangelical obedience. Other perhaps less well-known instances become the focus of the rest of her study. Over the next couple of chapters, Ceppi develops some of the ways that servitude was gendered and racialized in early New England. Her close readings of several specific episodes make each chapter work equally well on its own and collectively. The strange story of Elizabeth Knapp serves as the backdrop for her treatment of at least some of the ways that obedient service took on a gendered component. In 1671, Knapp struggled with service to God or to Satan as she experienced a period described by those around her, especially the minister Samuel Willard, as demonic possession. As she analyzes the "drama of consent" that ensued, Ceppi explores the ways that New Englanders attempted to make sense of the strange goings-on in their community, relying on hierarchy, service, and gender (52). While Knapp's extraordinary experience ended up being treated and explained in the context of gender, Ceppi takes a different approach when she examines the extraordinary life of Mary Rowlandson. Upon her captivity, Rowlandson found herself in a "wilderness thick with masters" (86). As Ceppi reads Rowlandson's narrative, she argues that the captive woman's racial difference from her new Nipmuck masters offers a different way of reading the servant-master relationship. This racialization of obedient service continues with Ceppi's treatment of African slavery in colonial New [End Page 221] England, especially in the works of Cotton Mather and the back-and-forth exchange between John Saffin and Samuel Sewell. In these writings, Ceppi builds a strong case that the Protestant "work ethic was a racial vocation" (119). Her examination of these texts demonstrates that this racial vocation served as the foundation for a Puritan "calling of whiteness" (146). This notion of whiteness becomes even more evident as she compares sermons and manuals aimed at enslaved Africans with those directed toward white servants. Such evidence in the servant-master relationship, then, reinforces her description of this racial vocation. Even with sources that have been examined fairly regularly, like Rowlandson's narrative, the debate between Sewell and Saffin, or the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Elisabeth Ceppi offers a...