Review: Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions

June 20, 2018 By Vanessa Holden in Book Review, Recent Scholarship Tags: colonial newspapers, colonial slavery, Complexion, cultural history, History of Race, history of science, history of the body, indentured servitude, Resistance, runaway, Sharon Block, Slavery 1 Comment

Sharon Block, Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Colonial Complextions Cover

At the opening of Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America, Sharon Block poses two provocative questions: “What were the meanings of black, white, and red in the colonial eighteenth century; and how did Anglo-American colonists describe people’s appearance?” (1) To answer these queries Block presents a cultural history race in Britain’s 18th century American colonies. She makes a careful study of the descriptors advertisers and editors used in missing colonial persons adds for runaway African descent and their European and Native American servants. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Historical Narratives, Contemporary Tools

December 14, 2016 By The Junto Moderator in Black Atlantic, Roundtables Tags: Black Atlantic, Delaware, Haiti, indentured servants, indentured servitude, Philadelphia, Poor laws, Poverty, Public History, Roundtable, Slavery, Welfare 2 Comments

This is the third post in The Junto’s roundtable on the Black Atlantic. The first was by Marley-Vincent Lindsey, and the second was by Mark J. Dixon. Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan holds a PhD in early American history from the University of Leicester and is Coordinator and Instructor of Public History at Rutgers University. She is currently completing a manuscript on vagrancy and indigent transiency in the early nineteenth century US.

The early modern Atlantic Ocean was traversed by countless seafarers with varying degrees of maritime experience, in varying degrees of (un)freedom. People used mobility, including travel by sea, to negotiate new identities for themselves, however precarious. Continue reading →

Q&A: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

May 7, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Interview, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, book review, British Atlantic, British Empire, capitalism, Cromwell, historiography, indentured servitude, Jamaica, political economy, Slavery 2 Comments

Abigail Swingen is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX). She received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago. She specializes in the Early Modern British Atlantic Political Economy. Competing Visions of Empire is her first book and was reviewed here yesterday. The following is part of our (relatively) new tradition of reviewing a book and then offering a Q & A with the author the following day. [NB: You can find my review from yesterday here.] Continue reading →

Review: Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire

May 6, 2015 By Jessica Parr in Book Review, Recent Scholarship, Review / Q&A Tags: 17th Century, 18th Century, book review, British Atlantic, capitalism, indentured servitude, Jamaica, Oliver Cromwell, Royal African Company, Slavery 1 Comment

**Abigail L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery, and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).**

There have been some fantastic new contributions of late that explore connections between slavery, economics, and empire. In his 2008 analysis of the American political economy, economic historian Gavin Wright concluded that the dependence on slave labor came not because of any institutional efficiency on the part of plantations, but rather, that no other form of coerced labor could have been made to meet the labor demands. Sven Beckart’s Bancroft Prize-winning book, Empire of Cotton, analyzes connections between cotton, and the slave labor behind it, and the rise of modern capitalism. Ed Baptist’s book, The Half Has Never Been Told, explores slavery’s role in the making of American capitalism.

Continue reading →