Reviews in American History

Slavery's considerable role in shaping New England has transformed the narrative of American slavery, part of a growing scholarship that centralizes the ubiquitous nature of the institution to building the societies, economies, and culture of the colonies that would become the Northern United States. Christy Clark-Pujara's Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island and Jared Ross Hardesty's Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston not only take on different New England societies but also represent different approaches to analyzing the place of slavery in the North. In Dark Work, Clark-Pujara examines Rhode Island, the smallest Northern colony with an outsized importance to the history of slavery. Hardesty's Unfreedom breaks from scholarly focus on the simple divide between slave and free, arguing that there existed a spectrum of unfreedom along which the lives of the enslaved in eighteenth-century Boston fell.

The public memorialization of history bookends Dark Work, detailing the recent push to confront Brown University's links to slavery, an effort which led in 2014 to the first and, to date, only memorial acknowledging the Ivy League's ties to slavery. Clark-Pujara's use of public history illustrates a growing trend to approach economic history in innovative ways. She skillfully deploys "economic history to investigate how the business of slavery shaped the establishment and growth of lifelong inheritable bondage in the North and how it affected the process of emancipation and black freedom" (p. 2). It is an enormous task, especially given Rhode Island's central role in the business of slavery. Supplementing a source base of court records with other early modern texts, Hardesty unfolds the intricacies of Boston's dense world of unfree labor in Unfreedom. He argues that, despite its modern cachet, notions of [End Page 558] liberty did not gain traction until the eve of the American Revolution, because before that the enslaved most commonly challenged slavery using everyday negotiations to achieve a degree of autonomy from a place of dependence. In effect, slaves labored within the hierarchical society of eighteenth-century Boston. They formed part of a larger class of urban poor who lived their lives along the spectrum of unfreedom.

Clark-Pujara's focus on black lives and the enduring legacy Rhode Islanders had on shaping both slavery and institutional racism marks a fundamental departure from scholarly narratives about Rhode Island that acknowledge its outsized role in the slave trade but ignore its place in shaping American thoughts about slavery and race. She opens chapter one with two examples of women who successfully claimed freedom: one white, one black. For the first it was enough that she was white, but the second had to prove her worth to society. Whiteness, freedom, and mastery became indelibly linked as Rhode Island inscribed slavery in law. In chapter two, "Living and Laboring under Slavery," Clark-Pujara focuses on the enslaved human beings whose labor fueled Rhode Island's business of slavery during the eighteenth century. She describes how they loved even against their owners' wishes, held festivals and picnics, danced and demanded that their lives transcend their labor.

In chapter three entitled, "Emancipation in Black and White," she shows how the demise of slaveholding in Rhode Island did not usher in a concurrent divestment in the business of slaveholding. On the contrary, slave trading families like the Browns were joined by newcomers such as the DeWolfs in creating a slave trading culture that between 1787 and 1807 "transported an estimated 45,230 Africans to bondage in the Americas, only about 10,000 fewer than they had transported in the previous seventy-seven years" (p. 84). By continuing their slave trade activities and shifting their industries to the production of "negro cloth," coarse material used to clothe the enslaved who...