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K. Mason, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World, by Michael Guasco, The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015, Pages 1555–1557, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev310
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Extract
Michael Guasco has certainly written a book with an arresting and thought-provoking opening. It commences by juxtaposing three familiar incidents: the arrival of the first cargo of Africans in Virginia in 1619, the transportation to Providence Island, following the Pequot War, of seventeen Native Americans officially characterised as ‘cannibal negroes’, and the brief parliamentary debate conducted in the late 1650s over ‘white slavery’ in Barbados. All are clearly stories about bondage in the English Atlantic. However, as Guasco emphasises, their underlying narratives were profoundly different, with, in these cases, Africans becoming (possibly) servants, Indians ‘negroes’, and Europeans ‘slaves’. This diversity and fluidity, he argues, was characteristic of the era prior to the development of the plantation system and the emergence of essentialist forms of racism, and it is this complicated early modern world that Guasco proceeds to reconstruct on the grounds that ‘we need know as much about the “before” as we do the “after”’ (p. 10).
