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The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America by Kate Haulman
4.0
If you were a Quaker woman living during the early eighteenth century you might slip on your fine-spun garments before you began your day of labor, but you would avoid decorative prints, jewelry, or other ostentatious adornments. If you were a New Yorker preparing for a formal ball you would spend hours perfecting your high-roll and assembling the whale-bone hoop to display the skirt you had made from the finest and most colorful materials available. However, if you were a Patriot living several decades later during the Revolutionary War you might trade in your silk and wool for a homespun dress and your jewelry, high-roll, and hat for a small lapel pin or badge to signal your solidarity with the cause. In all three cases what you decided to wear signaled something about your social class, political affiliation, religious beliefs, or gentility. In The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America, historian Kate Haulman traces how individuals mapped political, social, and gender ideas onto fashion and how fashion thus became a flash point for perennial anxieties about gender and gender relations among other things.
Haulman argues that fashion was intertwined with ideas about gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century and it became the primary way to distinguish between sensible and the appetitive or foppish. These distinctions between the sensible and the foppish had important implications for political divisions during the American Revolution as patriotic writers consistently linked treachery and loyalism to modes of high fashion. In turn, they ascribed patriotism to country and military modes, frugality, and bland homespun. Haulman shows that cultural pundits did not create fixed, top-down definitions of fashion. Pamphleteers and fashion critics constantly vied with the “lower sorts,” runaway slaves, and thieves who used fashion to subvert, mock or “pass” in a fluid social hierarchy.
Fashion remained in a constant state of flux during the early-1700s and incidentally provided space for runaway slaves, criminals, and “misfits” to don fashion à la mode and subvert social hierarchies. A lucrative black market trade in fashionable garments grew with the general upshot of consumerism in port-cities. Self-emancipated slaves often stole garments to keep up with the latest trends and pass as free blacks. Those trying to “pass” were always in jeopardy of being exposed. Because advertisers introduced the latest styles and trends of European court culture, and because merchants offered these for purchase, an item’s fashionableness was always ephemeral. For example, calico transitioned from the use in fashion to use in functional work clothing by the 1730s. Fine wools and silks eventually supplanted calico as the essential materials of stylish dress. Thus, calico’s fall from grace threatened to expose any self-emancipated slave who if seen wearing calico by 1730 looked the part of a common servant or slave.
From the French and Indian War onward, two competing discourses of fashion emerged. One argued that an individual’s frugality and plainness attested to their sensibility and capacity for virtue. The second encouraged women and men to continue buying extravagant clothes, stressed the legitimacy of high fashion for distinguishing the social elite, and dovetailed with the economic needs of a market-driven economy. The former discourse originated from political dislocations, especially after the Revenue (Sugar) Act of 1764 exacerbated tension with England. The latter emanated from merchants and consumers who drove demand for fashionable imports. Fashion created political and economic controversy by the 1770s as the consumption of imported fashion became the focal point for extolling ideal conceptions of feminine and masculine virtue and identifying those with a steeled commitment to the Patriot cause. The availability of imports intensified these discourses because the lower classes could ape the appearance of social elites by donning affordable high style garments. Fashion became an important means by which cultural and political pundits tried to locate and fix identity during the Revolutionary War.
These anxieties reached their fever pitch when General William Howe besieged and occupied Philadelphia in 1777. Before Howe’s occupation, Patriot pamphleteers already labeled women traitors who defied prescriptions for frugality and proscriptions against the high-roll and English-styled dress. Outward appearance demonstrated one’s political loyalties during the occupation. It wasn’t only their political loyalties that worried anxious Patriot men but, the sexual license that might accompany British-colonist relations inside Philadelphia—especially among the Quaker women who plied neutrality. Artwork and cartoons vilified colonial women bedecked in frippery who cavorted with the British enemy. Their stylistic and financial dependence on English fashion suggested their sexual impropriety and political disloyalty.
On the whole, Haulman has written a monograph rich with detail about “fashion” as both the physical adornment worn by individuals (e.g. the high-roll, hoops, wigs) and a social concept that individuals packed with various, contested meanings. Haulman has crafted an important work that challenges how historians conceptualize revolutionary politics and particularly how fashion and material culture exacerbated political and social schisms during the imperial crisis and American Revolution.
Haulman argues that fashion was intertwined with ideas about gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century and it became the primary way to distinguish between sensible and the appetitive or foppish. These distinctions between the sensible and the foppish had important implications for political divisions during the American Revolution as patriotic writers consistently linked treachery and loyalism to modes of high fashion. In turn, they ascribed patriotism to country and military modes, frugality, and bland homespun. Haulman shows that cultural pundits did not create fixed, top-down definitions of fashion. Pamphleteers and fashion critics constantly vied with the “lower sorts,” runaway slaves, and thieves who used fashion to subvert, mock or “pass” in a fluid social hierarchy.
Fashion remained in a constant state of flux during the early-1700s and incidentally provided space for runaway slaves, criminals, and “misfits” to don fashion à la mode and subvert social hierarchies. A lucrative black market trade in fashionable garments grew with the general upshot of consumerism in port-cities. Self-emancipated slaves often stole garments to keep up with the latest trends and pass as free blacks. Those trying to “pass” were always in jeopardy of being exposed. Because advertisers introduced the latest styles and trends of European court culture, and because merchants offered these for purchase, an item’s fashionableness was always ephemeral. For example, calico transitioned from the use in fashion to use in functional work clothing by the 1730s. Fine wools and silks eventually supplanted calico as the essential materials of stylish dress. Thus, calico’s fall from grace threatened to expose any self-emancipated slave who if seen wearing calico by 1730 looked the part of a common servant or slave.
From the French and Indian War onward, two competing discourses of fashion emerged. One argued that an individual’s frugality and plainness attested to their sensibility and capacity for virtue. The second encouraged women and men to continue buying extravagant clothes, stressed the legitimacy of high fashion for distinguishing the social elite, and dovetailed with the economic needs of a market-driven economy. The former discourse originated from political dislocations, especially after the Revenue (Sugar) Act of 1764 exacerbated tension with England. The latter emanated from merchants and consumers who drove demand for fashionable imports. Fashion created political and economic controversy by the 1770s as the consumption of imported fashion became the focal point for extolling ideal conceptions of feminine and masculine virtue and identifying those with a steeled commitment to the Patriot cause. The availability of imports intensified these discourses because the lower classes could ape the appearance of social elites by donning affordable high style garments. Fashion became an important means by which cultural and political pundits tried to locate and fix identity during the Revolutionary War.
These anxieties reached their fever pitch when General William Howe besieged and occupied Philadelphia in 1777. Before Howe’s occupation, Patriot pamphleteers already labeled women traitors who defied prescriptions for frugality and proscriptions against the high-roll and English-styled dress. Outward appearance demonstrated one’s political loyalties during the occupation. It wasn’t only their political loyalties that worried anxious Patriot men but, the sexual license that might accompany British-colonist relations inside Philadelphia—especially among the Quaker women who plied neutrality. Artwork and cartoons vilified colonial women bedecked in frippery who cavorted with the British enemy. Their stylistic and financial dependence on English fashion suggested their sexual impropriety and political disloyalty.
On the whole, Haulman has written a monograph rich with detail about “fashion” as both the physical adornment worn by individuals (e.g. the high-roll, hoops, wigs) and a social concept that individuals packed with various, contested meanings. Haulman has crafted an important work that challenges how historians conceptualize revolutionary politics and particularly how fashion and material culture exacerbated political and social schisms during the imperial crisis and American Revolution.
Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana by Sophie White
3.0
In the early eighteenth century, Marie Rouensa lived in a house that conformed to the vertical log construction of most French colonial settlements, complete with a picket fence. Nearby residences featured the prominent galerie, or wrap-around porch. She and many neighbors used French silverware and armoires. Rouensa might cook dinner in an outdoor oven and relax with her husband by the fireplace on cold winter nights. Ignon Ouacomsen and her husband Dubois enjoyed French bedding and decorations, twenty-eight napkins, and a large mirror. Marie Ma8ennakoe, who died in 1740, possessed a vaisselier to display her fine plates, platters, and copper candlesticks. These women lived in Kaskaskia, a French colonial settlement in Illinois Country. They were not Frenchwomen by birth, but Illinois Indians who married Frenchmen. French officials and missionaries apprehended the ethnic identity of Native American women through their “manner of living” well into the eighteenth century (33). As the French Caribbean imported proto-biological racism into New Orleans and the Lower Louisiana Colony, French missionaries used the success of “Frenchification” in Kaskaskia as an argument against further racialization in Illinois Country. Sophie White traces these processes in her detailed study of material culture, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians.
White focuses on cross-cultural exchanges between French colonists and Native Americans and argues that both groups adopted clothing and goods for their usefulness and because those objects expressed their ethnic and social identity to others. Because French officials and missionaries and Illinois Indians believed that “Frenchness” and “Indianness” originated from cultural practice and behavior, material culture made possible fluid and dynamic “conceptions of difference” in the Illinois Country (12). Likewise, many Illinois Indians premised captive adoption and intermarriage on the flexibility of identity. The Kaskaskian women who possessed French goods and modeled appropriate body care, layering of clothes, and tasteful deportment were signaling their permanent transformation into Frenchwomen.
French missionaries, charged by the Crown to make French subjects of Native Americans through cultural and religious conversion, became crucial to “Frenchification” policies because they taught Kaskaskian women how to use their French goods. Kaskaskians first learned of French dress and deportment from copper-plate engravings of the Gospel that were disseminated by missionaries. The plates presented ideal Frenchwomen and European standards of “sartorial performance” (56). While catechumen studied these engravings extensively they also observed first-hand how missionaries wore the “body-concealing conventions” of European dress. Hence, after Marie Rouensa converted to Catholicism she wore a fine-spun mantelet and gown to convey her genteel French identity. Missionaries subsequently championed Rouensa’s religious sincerity to argue that Native Americans were capable of “Frenchification.”
If at first “Frenchification” implies the total elision of indigenous traditions, White persuasively argues that these women were actually fulfilling a traditional expectation of intermarriage: assuming the identity and culture of their husbands. Kaskaskian responses to the French presence—namely conversion, intermarriage, and acculturation—represented a sophisticated response to cross-cultural exchange that cemented alliances, secured trade, and extended kinship networks. Many Illinois Indians believed in “covering the dead,” or adopting captives who literally embodied the spirit and identity of a deceased tribal member. French assumptions that identity stemmed from cultural practice were compatible with the Illinois belief that ritual stripping and re-dressing of captives signaled their inner transformation. Taken as a whole, exogamy required that Kaskaskian wives assume the identity of their spouse—whether Illinois, non-Illinois, or French—and thus their acculturation was a natural extension and fulfillment of indigenous processes that potentially enriched tribal political and economic connections.
There were limits to “Frenchification” benefits as Native women traveled from Illinois Country into New Orleans. Marie Turpin hailed from a mixed-parentage Kaskaskian family and journeyed to New Orleans in 1747 to become a Catholic nun in the Ursuline Order. Her neighbors and religious mentors testified to her piety and Frenchness. Although Turpin symbolized the ideal convert, the Ursulines barred Turpin from the esteemed “choir nun” rank by inducting her as a “converse” nun with circumscribed educational opportunities. On one hand, Turpin’s subordination stemmed from the Order’s failed “Frenchification” experiment in Quebec and from the growing resonance of racial essentialism in Lower Louisiana—an ideology that expanded alongside the burgeoning African population. On the other hand, the widespread successes of “Frenchification” in the Illinois Country sustained fluid conceptions of identity and made possible Turpin’s remarkable career with the Ursulines.
On the whole, White has crafted an important work that demonstrates the materiality and meaning of clothing was fundamental to how individuals navigated conceptions of difference. White admits that her approach is thematic and rooted in case studies that explain more about what objects meant to “Frenchified” tribes like the Kaskaskia than those who rejected French overtures. Nevertheless, White’s attention to what goods meant in different cultural and spatial contexts illustrates how individuals based mutable, fluid identities on material culture—a source base with the potential to supplement scarce written sources and expand our knowledge of Native American life.
One footnote on the writing (some may find this pedantic):
Sophie White's writing style, with its penchant for obscure, vague, and confounding language, will deter most scholars and educated readers. She uses a number of historical buzzwords like complicate, mediate, materiality, or subjectivity that usually obscure rather than clarify the meaning of sentences. She uses the phrase that Native Americans or French used material culture to apprehend the "three-dimensional figures before them" rather than saying that they used clothing to recognize whether a person was French, Indian, or someone else. There is simply no reason to substitute "three-dimensional image/object/figure" for a much clearer word—Indian, Frenchmen, woman, person, house, shirt, fence. Many of White's most compelling points are unfortunately obscured or muddied by her over-reliance on jargon and verbose passages.
White focuses on cross-cultural exchanges between French colonists and Native Americans and argues that both groups adopted clothing and goods for their usefulness and because those objects expressed their ethnic and social identity to others. Because French officials and missionaries and Illinois Indians believed that “Frenchness” and “Indianness” originated from cultural practice and behavior, material culture made possible fluid and dynamic “conceptions of difference” in the Illinois Country (12). Likewise, many Illinois Indians premised captive adoption and intermarriage on the flexibility of identity. The Kaskaskian women who possessed French goods and modeled appropriate body care, layering of clothes, and tasteful deportment were signaling their permanent transformation into Frenchwomen.
French missionaries, charged by the Crown to make French subjects of Native Americans through cultural and religious conversion, became crucial to “Frenchification” policies because they taught Kaskaskian women how to use their French goods. Kaskaskians first learned of French dress and deportment from copper-plate engravings of the Gospel that were disseminated by missionaries. The plates presented ideal Frenchwomen and European standards of “sartorial performance” (56). While catechumen studied these engravings extensively they also observed first-hand how missionaries wore the “body-concealing conventions” of European dress. Hence, after Marie Rouensa converted to Catholicism she wore a fine-spun mantelet and gown to convey her genteel French identity. Missionaries subsequently championed Rouensa’s religious sincerity to argue that Native Americans were capable of “Frenchification.”
If at first “Frenchification” implies the total elision of indigenous traditions, White persuasively argues that these women were actually fulfilling a traditional expectation of intermarriage: assuming the identity and culture of their husbands. Kaskaskian responses to the French presence—namely conversion, intermarriage, and acculturation—represented a sophisticated response to cross-cultural exchange that cemented alliances, secured trade, and extended kinship networks. Many Illinois Indians believed in “covering the dead,” or adopting captives who literally embodied the spirit and identity of a deceased tribal member. French assumptions that identity stemmed from cultural practice were compatible with the Illinois belief that ritual stripping and re-dressing of captives signaled their inner transformation. Taken as a whole, exogamy required that Kaskaskian wives assume the identity of their spouse—whether Illinois, non-Illinois, or French—and thus their acculturation was a natural extension and fulfillment of indigenous processes that potentially enriched tribal political and economic connections.
There were limits to “Frenchification” benefits as Native women traveled from Illinois Country into New Orleans. Marie Turpin hailed from a mixed-parentage Kaskaskian family and journeyed to New Orleans in 1747 to become a Catholic nun in the Ursuline Order. Her neighbors and religious mentors testified to her piety and Frenchness. Although Turpin symbolized the ideal convert, the Ursulines barred Turpin from the esteemed “choir nun” rank by inducting her as a “converse” nun with circumscribed educational opportunities. On one hand, Turpin’s subordination stemmed from the Order’s failed “Frenchification” experiment in Quebec and from the growing resonance of racial essentialism in Lower Louisiana—an ideology that expanded alongside the burgeoning African population. On the other hand, the widespread successes of “Frenchification” in the Illinois Country sustained fluid conceptions of identity and made possible Turpin’s remarkable career with the Ursulines.
On the whole, White has crafted an important work that demonstrates the materiality and meaning of clothing was fundamental to how individuals navigated conceptions of difference. White admits that her approach is thematic and rooted in case studies that explain more about what objects meant to “Frenchified” tribes like the Kaskaskia than those who rejected French overtures. Nevertheless, White’s attention to what goods meant in different cultural and spatial contexts illustrates how individuals based mutable, fluid identities on material culture—a source base with the potential to supplement scarce written sources and expand our knowledge of Native American life.
One footnote on the writing (some may find this pedantic):
Sophie White's writing style, with its penchant for obscure, vague, and confounding language, will deter most scholars and educated readers. She uses a number of historical buzzwords like complicate, mediate, materiality, or subjectivity that usually obscure rather than clarify the meaning of sentences. She uses the phrase that Native Americans or French used material culture to apprehend the "three-dimensional figures before them" rather than saying that they used clothing to recognize whether a person was French, Indian, or someone else. There is simply no reason to substitute "three-dimensional image/object/figure" for a much clearer word—Indian, Frenchmen, woman, person, house, shirt, fence. Many of White's most compelling points are unfortunately obscured or muddied by her over-reliance on jargon and verbose passages.
Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World by David Brion Davis
4.0
David Brion Davis’ Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World traces the development, apex, and collapse of race-based slavery in the Atlantic World. Although Davis treats North American slavery extensively in this volume, he fits the United States South into an Atlantic, if not broadly western, context that stretches back to the legacies of Greco-Roman antiquity. Throughout the volume, Davis rejects economic determinism and subordinates material forces to the conceptual. It was ideas and philosophies about human nature and symbolic associations with “darkness” and evil in Jewish and Christian, European and Middle-Eastern thought that shaped the contours of New World slavery, and subsequent reinterpretations that provoked its rise and fall. For example, abolitionism circulated the Atlantic littoral and mutually reinforced movements in England, the U.S. North, and ratcheted up resistance in the U.S. South. Hence, he argues for the central connection of abolitionist thought to the collapse of trans-Atlantic slavery during the late nineteenth century.
A Professor Emeritus of Yale University, Davis synthesizes three decades of international scholarship on Atlantic World slavery and continues his work on slavery that began with his seminal two-volume Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Cornell, 1966, 1975). Davis organizes the volume into three thematic parts. First, he explores the motley factors emanating from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that predisposed New World slavery to racial systems and brute dehumanization—the root causes being common interpretations of the Biblical “Curse of Ham,” Islamic and Iberian associations of “blackness” with slavery or “other,” and the Aristotelian concept that slaves were “merely a tool or instrument, the extension of the owner’s physical nature” (p. 33). These long-term intellectual trends in European history coalesced during the sixteenth century to produce a form of chattel slavery inseparable from Africans.
The middle portion of Inhuman Bondage explains why early abolitionism failed to take hold in the eighteenth century United States, and argues that the American and Haitian Revolutions provided important conceptual frameworks for the continuation and retardation of abolition in the New World. Davis’ final portion analyzes intellectual exchanges between British and American abolitionists, asserting that Great Britain’s emancipation of Caribbean slaves reinforced Southern paranoia and obstinacy on slavery, especially given their suspicion that the British had designs for Texas and the western United States. This final section showcases how the American Civil War was inextricable from its Atlantic context.
Throughout, Davis moves fluidly between textured local examples of African-American resistance on the plantation and abolitionist movements in the Atlantic world. He captures how slaves, ranging from the illustrious Toussaint L’Oueveture to the nameless contraband that fled the war-torn U.S. South, challenged a system that treated slaves as chattel and extensions of their master’s will. No amount of Biblical justification or legal gymnastics could erase the unconquerable humanity of slaves—the inherent flaw in the system that confounded Aristotle and centuries of secular and Christian philosophers and provided an opening for abolitionists to challenge the moral consensus. British and American abolitionists were motors for change, but their work was also dependent on the individual actions of countless slaves and freed people.
Davis’ assumption that ideas are more powerful than material forces becomes clear, and persuasive, when he interprets the British emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean. Since 1944, scholars have debated Eric Williams’s thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that poor economic growth, the American Revolution, and the transition from mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism prompted emancipation in the British Caribbean. Williams concluded that British emancipation was done out of economic self-preservation, and not concern for human progress. Davis reformulates Williams’ “linkage of capitalism and antislavery,” suggesting that it was the rise of free labor ideology— the “pressing need” to “dignify and even ennoble wage labor” that precipitated British emancipation (p. 248). Pragmatic British abolitionists forged a bond between labor, capital, and parliament by connecting emancipation to the rhetoric of free labor. Not only did coerced labor impede competition in a capitalist society, but also the mental and physical images of “seminaked laborers being driven by the whip” on New World plantations reinforced the abolitionist argument that slavery degraded the value of wage labor (p. 248-249). British abolition vindicated the power of social movements to effect social progress, and for nation-states to transcend economic self-interest to ameliorate the conditions of oppressed people.
At times Davis’ commitment to idealism does become muddied, especially when he considers whether race-based slavery arose from conceptual or material origins. When discussing the origins of race-based thought in the Middle East and Europe, Davis offers a materialist argument: “if Jews or Christians had been in the Arabs’ place, actively enslaving, purchasing, and transporting sub-Saharan Africans, they would surely have generated their own justifying ideology” that linked slavery with blackness (p. 69). To the contrary, he emphasizes the primacy of ideology by arguing that Africans came “ready made” to plug into a Euro-Middle Eastern social hierarchy that for centuries associated general stereotypes and degrading symbolism with slaves, enforced chattel slavery with brutal, dehumanizing force, and actively grasped for a “universal” signifier to distinguish slaves from free citizens (p. 53). In the end, this reviewer was left uncertain about whether the “origins of antiblack racism” (p. 48) were rooted in conceptual or material forces—although granted it’s a classic conundrum of which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Davis admits in the prologue that Inhuman Bondage originated during a two-week summer seminar for high school teachers, and was subsequently honed through undergraduate lectures (p. 3-4). Because Davis markets the book to the general public and scholars—especially public educators—his prose emulates lecture prose with sometimes jarring pauses to draw comparisons between the past and present. Nevertheless, the end result is a cogently argued, historiographically grounded work on slavery from which lay readers, undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike can glean important insights into the culturally constructed nature of trans-Atlantic slavery.
A Professor Emeritus of Yale University, Davis synthesizes three decades of international scholarship on Atlantic World slavery and continues his work on slavery that began with his seminal two-volume Problem of Slavery in Western Culture and Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Cornell, 1966, 1975). Davis organizes the volume into three thematic parts. First, he explores the motley factors emanating from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa that predisposed New World slavery to racial systems and brute dehumanization—the root causes being common interpretations of the Biblical “Curse of Ham,” Islamic and Iberian associations of “blackness” with slavery or “other,” and the Aristotelian concept that slaves were “merely a tool or instrument, the extension of the owner’s physical nature” (p. 33). These long-term intellectual trends in European history coalesced during the sixteenth century to produce a form of chattel slavery inseparable from Africans.
The middle portion of Inhuman Bondage explains why early abolitionism failed to take hold in the eighteenth century United States, and argues that the American and Haitian Revolutions provided important conceptual frameworks for the continuation and retardation of abolition in the New World. Davis’ final portion analyzes intellectual exchanges between British and American abolitionists, asserting that Great Britain’s emancipation of Caribbean slaves reinforced Southern paranoia and obstinacy on slavery, especially given their suspicion that the British had designs for Texas and the western United States. This final section showcases how the American Civil War was inextricable from its Atlantic context.
Throughout, Davis moves fluidly between textured local examples of African-American resistance on the plantation and abolitionist movements in the Atlantic world. He captures how slaves, ranging from the illustrious Toussaint L’Oueveture to the nameless contraband that fled the war-torn U.S. South, challenged a system that treated slaves as chattel and extensions of their master’s will. No amount of Biblical justification or legal gymnastics could erase the unconquerable humanity of slaves—the inherent flaw in the system that confounded Aristotle and centuries of secular and Christian philosophers and provided an opening for abolitionists to challenge the moral consensus. British and American abolitionists were motors for change, but their work was also dependent on the individual actions of countless slaves and freed people.
Davis’ assumption that ideas are more powerful than material forces becomes clear, and persuasive, when he interprets the British emancipation of 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean. Since 1944, scholars have debated Eric Williams’s thesis in Capitalism and Slavery that poor economic growth, the American Revolution, and the transition from mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism prompted emancipation in the British Caribbean. Williams concluded that British emancipation was done out of economic self-preservation, and not concern for human progress. Davis reformulates Williams’ “linkage of capitalism and antislavery,” suggesting that it was the rise of free labor ideology— the “pressing need” to “dignify and even ennoble wage labor” that precipitated British emancipation (p. 248). Pragmatic British abolitionists forged a bond between labor, capital, and parliament by connecting emancipation to the rhetoric of free labor. Not only did coerced labor impede competition in a capitalist society, but also the mental and physical images of “seminaked laborers being driven by the whip” on New World plantations reinforced the abolitionist argument that slavery degraded the value of wage labor (p. 248-249). British abolition vindicated the power of social movements to effect social progress, and for nation-states to transcend economic self-interest to ameliorate the conditions of oppressed people.
At times Davis’ commitment to idealism does become muddied, especially when he considers whether race-based slavery arose from conceptual or material origins. When discussing the origins of race-based thought in the Middle East and Europe, Davis offers a materialist argument: “if Jews or Christians had been in the Arabs’ place, actively enslaving, purchasing, and transporting sub-Saharan Africans, they would surely have generated their own justifying ideology” that linked slavery with blackness (p. 69). To the contrary, he emphasizes the primacy of ideology by arguing that Africans came “ready made” to plug into a Euro-Middle Eastern social hierarchy that for centuries associated general stereotypes and degrading symbolism with slaves, enforced chattel slavery with brutal, dehumanizing force, and actively grasped for a “universal” signifier to distinguish slaves from free citizens (p. 53). In the end, this reviewer was left uncertain about whether the “origins of antiblack racism” (p. 48) were rooted in conceptual or material forces—although granted it’s a classic conundrum of which came first: the chicken or the egg.
Davis admits in the prologue that Inhuman Bondage originated during a two-week summer seminar for high school teachers, and was subsequently honed through undergraduate lectures (p. 3-4). Because Davis markets the book to the general public and scholars—especially public educators—his prose emulates lecture prose with sometimes jarring pauses to draw comparisons between the past and present. Nevertheless, the end result is a cogently argued, historiographically grounded work on slavery from which lay readers, undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars alike can glean important insights into the culturally constructed nature of trans-Atlantic slavery.