Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903173
P. Olsen-Harbich
“Bodily modifications,” Mairin Odle contends in Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America, “penetrated colonial skin and colonial imaginations” (6) from the era of earliest English-Indigenous contact through the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. Across 122 exceptionally economical and clear pages, Odle presents such modifications—principally tattooing and scalping—as “corporeal evidence” (2) of cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and Natives and investigates how they were variously received within the “settler logics” (4) of colonial societies. Settler colonists, Odle convincingly demonstrates, used Indigenous bodily modification customs as “ideological resources” (3) that could be assimilated either in thought and practice to “allow newcomers to feel at ‘home’ in the lands of others” or, alternatively, renounced as “evidence of Native inferiority or barbarity” (118). This ambiguous settler narrative and its embodied forms were eventually displaced by nineteenth-century racial ideologies that sought “to circumscribe the possibility of cultural transformation” and idealized “unmarked” (122) white bodies and societies rather than those adapted to American environs through appropriated modifications. Under the Skin’s opening chapter—an analysis of tattooing among Carolinian Algonquians and its reception by English settlers—stands out as the best scholarly treatment of that subject yet produced. Here, Odle aims to establish that early English observers such as Thomas Harriot (Hariot), the Roanoke colonist and polymath, regarded Native tattoos “as communication systems needing interpretation, comparable (if not exactly parallel with) writing” (9) or “complex media forms that they saw as analogous but not equivalent to their own writing” (15). The premise of English attention to Indigenous tattooing is persuasively established, as Odle shows that colonists had “great interest in understanding Native media systems” (20), which Harriot and others expressed by “mapping” (17) Indigenous societies through “systematic observations” (16), including recording tattoos.1 Odle furthermore
{"title":"Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America by Mairin Odle (review)","authors":"P. Olsen-Harbich","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a903173","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903173","url":null,"abstract":"“Bodily modifications,” Mairin Odle contends in Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America, “penetrated colonial skin and colonial imaginations” (6) from the era of earliest English-Indigenous contact through the mid-nineteenth century and beyond. Across 122 exceptionally economical and clear pages, Odle presents such modifications—principally tattooing and scalping—as “corporeal evidence” (2) of cross-cultural interactions between Europeans and Natives and investigates how they were variously received within the “settler logics” (4) of colonial societies. Settler colonists, Odle convincingly demonstrates, used Indigenous bodily modification customs as “ideological resources” (3) that could be assimilated either in thought and practice to “allow newcomers to feel at ‘home’ in the lands of others” or, alternatively, renounced as “evidence of Native inferiority or barbarity” (118). This ambiguous settler narrative and its embodied forms were eventually displaced by nineteenth-century racial ideologies that sought “to circumscribe the possibility of cultural transformation” and idealized “unmarked” (122) white bodies and societies rather than those adapted to American environs through appropriated modifications. Under the Skin’s opening chapter—an analysis of tattooing among Carolinian Algonquians and its reception by English settlers—stands out as the best scholarly treatment of that subject yet produced. Here, Odle aims to establish that early English observers such as Thomas Harriot (Hariot), the Roanoke colonist and polymath, regarded Native tattoos “as communication systems needing interpretation, comparable (if not exactly parallel with) writing” (9) or “complex media forms that they saw as analogous but not equivalent to their own writing” (15). The premise of English attention to Indigenous tattooing is persuasively established, as Odle shows that colonists had “great interest in understanding Native media systems” (20), which Harriot and others expressed by “mapping” (17) Indigenous societies through “systematic observations” (16), including recording tattoos.1 Odle furthermore","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"594 - 597"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45940360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903174
Erin Trahey
In a lecture given in 1988 entitled “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison claimed that “silences are being broken” and “lost things have been found,” as scholars of slavery and colonialism were “disentangling received knowledge from the apparatus of control.”1 In his book, The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World, historical geographer Miles Ogborn demonstrates how, amid the violence of slavery, unspeakable things could be, and were, spoken. Drawing inspiration from Morrison’s words, Ogborn draws attention to the “geographies of silencing and violence” (18) within Atlantic world slave societies and the ways in which rules surrounding speech oppressed enslaved men and women. Yet Ogborn also argues that in “necessity, ubiquity, and ephemerality” (235), words possessed the power to transcend, challenge, and enact change. Drawing on scholarship across the fields of history, geography, anthropology, and philosophy—reaching from the Caribbean to Britain and across the Black Atlantic world—The Freedom of Speech demonstrates that speech is central to the study of slavery and understandings of empire, race, gender, freedom, and power. As Ogborn argues, “empires were oral cultures too” (234), and systems of racial dominance, power, and violence were enacted through speech in determinations of who could speak, when, how, and where. Indeed, slavery and freedom were made and remade through the policing and regulation of speech as well as knowledge. These contests took place in various arenas, including colonial assembly rooms and courts; the speaking, writing, and making of botanical knowledge; the writings of abolitionists and proslavery advocates; and the words spoken every day between free and enslaved men and women. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s work on speech act theory, Ogborn explores how speech worked in areas of law, politics, natural knowledge, and religion, and how the freedoms attached to speech—alongside multiple forms of silencing—shaped the bounds of slavery and freedom while also calling attention to the transformative power of speech to contest those boundaries.2
{"title":"The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World by Miles Ogborn (review)","authors":"Erin Trahey","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a903174","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903174","url":null,"abstract":"In a lecture given in 1988 entitled “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison claimed that “silences are being broken” and “lost things have been found,” as scholars of slavery and colonialism were “disentangling received knowledge from the apparatus of control.”1 In his book, The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World, historical geographer Miles Ogborn demonstrates how, amid the violence of slavery, unspeakable things could be, and were, spoken. Drawing inspiration from Morrison’s words, Ogborn draws attention to the “geographies of silencing and violence” (18) within Atlantic world slave societies and the ways in which rules surrounding speech oppressed enslaved men and women. Yet Ogborn also argues that in “necessity, ubiquity, and ephemerality” (235), words possessed the power to transcend, challenge, and enact change. Drawing on scholarship across the fields of history, geography, anthropology, and philosophy—reaching from the Caribbean to Britain and across the Black Atlantic world—The Freedom of Speech demonstrates that speech is central to the study of slavery and understandings of empire, race, gender, freedom, and power. As Ogborn argues, “empires were oral cultures too” (234), and systems of racial dominance, power, and violence were enacted through speech in determinations of who could speak, when, how, and where. Indeed, slavery and freedom were made and remade through the policing and regulation of speech as well as knowledge. These contests took place in various arenas, including colonial assembly rooms and courts; the speaking, writing, and making of botanical knowledge; the writings of abolitionists and proslavery advocates; and the words spoken every day between free and enslaved men and women. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s work on speech act theory, Ogborn explores how speech worked in areas of law, politics, natural knowledge, and religion, and how the freedoms attached to speech—alongside multiple forms of silencing—shaped the bounds of slavery and freedom while also calling attention to the transformative power of speech to contest those boundaries.2","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"598 - 602"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42449875","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903168
M. Dantas
The concept of social death, developed by sociologist Orlando Patterson in his now-classic book Slavery and Social Death, continues to loom large in debates about early modern Atlantic slavery.1 Numerous scholars have engaged with Patterson’s work to make sense of enslavement and its impact on the enslaved individual.2 This literature has left us with a very clear picture of the exploitation, brutalization, denial of rights, and indeed denial of personhood that enslaved Africans and their descendants endured. Their treatment and the place they were forced to occupy in the slavery-based economic system that shaped our modern age produced such alienation from society that, even if they did not succumb to physical death, they became, as Patterson explains, socially dead. Patterson’s work has also offered a generative conceptual starting point for these scholars to explore the ways in which enslaved people, individually and collectively, survived and pushed back against the violent realities of enslavement. In Almost Dead, Michael Lawrence Dickinson contributes to that effort. He does so by exploring the analytic potential of the idea of social rebirth articulated by, among others, Stephanie E. Smallwood in her book Saltwater Slavery.3 Smallwood uses the term to encapsulate the social and cultural dynamics Africans engaged in to survive the dehumanization and alienation they suffered during the Atlantic slave trade. Dickinson applies social rebirth to a discussion of Black survival in urban Anglo-America—specifically Bridgetown, Kingston, and Philadelphia— from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Throughout the book’s five chapters, Dickinson demonstrates that, if slavery inflicted a
社会学家奥兰多·帕特森（Orlando Patterson）在其现在的经典著作《奴隶制与社会死亡》（Slavery and social death）中提出的社会死亡概念，在关于早期现代大西洋奴隶制的辩论中继续占据重要地位。1许多学者参与了帕特森的工作，以理解奴役及其对被奴役者的影响，被奴役的非洲人及其后代所忍受的残暴、剥夺权利，甚至剥夺人格。他们的待遇以及他们在塑造我们现代社会的以奴隶制为基础的经济体系中被迫占据的地位，产生了与社会的疏离感，即使他们没有屈服于肉体上的死亡，正如帕特森所解释的那样，他们也会在社会上死亡。帕特森的工作也为这些学者提供了一个生成性的概念起点，以探索被奴役的人，无论是个人还是集体，如何生存并反抗奴役的暴力现实。在《快死了》中，迈克尔·劳伦斯·狄金森为这一努力做出了贡献。他通过探索斯蒂芬妮·E·斯莫尔伍德（Stephanie E.Smallwood）等人在《盐水奴隶制》（Saltwater Slavery）一书中阐述的社会重生思想的分析潜力来做到这一点。3斯莫尔伍德用这个词概括了非洲人在大西洋奴隶贸易中遭受的非人化和异化中所参与的社会和文化动态。迪金森将社会再生应用于17世纪末至19世纪初英美城市——特别是布里奇敦、金斯敦和费城——黑人生存的讨论。在这本书的五章中，狄金森证明，如果奴隶制造成了
{"title":"Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807 by Michael Lawrence Dickinson (review)","authors":"M. Dantas","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a903168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903168","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of social death, developed by sociologist Orlando Patterson in his now-classic book Slavery and Social Death, continues to loom large in debates about early modern Atlantic slavery.1 Numerous scholars have engaged with Patterson’s work to make sense of enslavement and its impact on the enslaved individual.2 This literature has left us with a very clear picture of the exploitation, brutalization, denial of rights, and indeed denial of personhood that enslaved Africans and their descendants endured. Their treatment and the place they were forced to occupy in the slavery-based economic system that shaped our modern age produced such alienation from society that, even if they did not succumb to physical death, they became, as Patterson explains, socially dead. Patterson’s work has also offered a generative conceptual starting point for these scholars to explore the ways in which enslaved people, individually and collectively, survived and pushed back against the violent realities of enslavement. In Almost Dead, Michael Lawrence Dickinson contributes to that effort. He does so by exploring the analytic potential of the idea of social rebirth articulated by, among others, Stephanie E. Smallwood in her book Saltwater Slavery.3 Smallwood uses the term to encapsulate the social and cultural dynamics Africans engaged in to survive the dehumanization and alienation they suffered during the Atlantic slave trade. Dickinson applies social rebirth to a discussion of Black survival in urban Anglo-America—specifically Bridgetown, Kingston, and Philadelphia— from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Throughout the book’s five chapters, Dickinson demonstrates that, if slavery inflicted a","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"568 - 572"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49251034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903171
Emily J. Macgillivray
Maeve Kane’s Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries examines Haudenosaunee material culture and gendered labor from contact with settlers in the seventeenth century through the creation of academic anthropology with its focus on Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Kane argues that across these three centuries, Haudenosaunee women adapted material culture and political practices to ensure their nation’s survival in the face of intensified American colonial pressures. Successfully centering gender as a category of analysis while avoiding tropes of Indigenous history as a series of ruptures and breaks with tradition, Shirts Powdered Red illustrates the centrality of women’s domestic and political work to Haudenosaunee self-determination in multiple eras.
{"title":"Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries by Maeve Kane (review)","authors":"Emily J. Macgillivray","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a903171","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903171","url":null,"abstract":"Maeve Kane’s Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries examines Haudenosaunee material culture and gendered labor from contact with settlers in the seventeenth century through the creation of academic anthropology with its focus on Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century. Kane argues that across these three centuries, Haudenosaunee women adapted material culture and political practices to ensure their nation’s survival in the face of intensified American colonial pressures. Successfully centering gender as a category of analysis while avoiding tropes of Indigenous history as a series of ruptures and breaks with tradition, Shirts Powdered Red illustrates the centrality of women’s domestic and political work to Haudenosaunee self-determination in multiple eras.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"583 - 588"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45927807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903162
Peter C. Mancall
Abstract:Taking the opportunity of a seminal article's fiftieth anniversary, Audrey Horning, Peter Mancall, Hiram Morgan, and Rory Rapple discuss the impact of Nicholas P. Canny's 1973 William and Mary Quarterly article, "The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America," on scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Alison Games provides an introductory essay for the Forum, and Canny provides a response.
{"title":"Disappointment, Grievance, and Violence in Early Virginia","authors":"Peter C. Mancall","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a903162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903162","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Taking the opportunity of a seminal article's fiftieth anniversary, Audrey Horning, Peter Mancall, Hiram Morgan, and Rory Rapple discuss the impact of Nicholas P. Canny's 1973 William and Mary Quarterly article, \"The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,\" on scholarship on both sides of the Atlantic. Alison Games provides an introductory essay for the Forum, and Canny provides a response.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"465 - 472"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41427133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903169
Ernesto Mercado-Montero
{"title":"Isle of Devils, Isle of Saints: An Atlantic History of Bermuda, 1609–1684 by Michael J. Jarvis (review)","authors":"Ernesto Mercado-Montero","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a903169","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903169","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"573 - 577"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43307257","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903175
Mary S. Draper
{"title":"No Wood, No Kingdom: Political Ecology in the English Atlantic by Keith Pluymers (review)","authors":"Mary S. Draper","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.a903175","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.a903175","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"603 - 607"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46804277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"At Kingdom's Edge: The Suriname Struggles of Jeronimy Clifford, English Subject by Jacob Selwood (review)","authors":"C. Koot","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0028","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"423 - 427"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43174383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 by Brooke M. Bauer (review)","authors":"Alejandra Dubcovsky","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"394 - 397"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43182597","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Reflecting on advances in research on Indigenous slavery in the Americas is essential. But it is also imperative to step back and consider why Indigenous slavery only gained a significant foothold in academic studies in the twenty-first century. This article considers several reasons why Indigenous slavery in the Americas was, until recently, considered no more than a short-lived preamble to the horrors of the enslavement of Africans. The topic of disease—and especially discussions about the susceptibility to European diseases that supposedly emptied entire Indigenous landscapes of their inhabitants—has functioned as a heuristic device in historical studies while concurrently tethering the decimation of Indigenous populations to the increased importation of African laborers to replace them. The main economic explanations given in the historical literature for the transition from enslaving Indigenous people (the first slavery) to enslaving Africans overemphasize the African slave trade that supplied laborers for monocultural plantation production in the littoral areas of North and South America and on many Caribbean islands, thus eliding or underplaying the existence and persistence of Indigenous slavery, both in those places in other parts of the Americas. Those habits of thought and argumentation have been abetted and reinforced by the archive's power to tether the two histories of slavery through plenitude, erasure, and obfuscation in how documents are created, stored, and accessed.
{"title":"In the Tethered Shadow: Native American Slavery, African Slavery, and the Disappearance of the Past","authors":"Nancy E. van Deusen","doi":"10.1353/wmq.2023.0020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wmq.2023.0020","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Reflecting on advances in research on Indigenous slavery in the Americas is essential. But it is also imperative to step back and consider why Indigenous slavery only gained a significant foothold in academic studies in the twenty-first century. This article considers several reasons why Indigenous slavery in the Americas was, until recently, considered no more than a short-lived preamble to the horrors of the enslavement of Africans. The topic of disease—and especially discussions about the susceptibility to European diseases that supposedly emptied entire Indigenous landscapes of their inhabitants—has functioned as a heuristic device in historical studies while concurrently tethering the decimation of Indigenous populations to the increased importation of African laborers to replace them. The main economic explanations given in the historical literature for the transition from enslaving Indigenous people (the first slavery) to enslaving Africans overemphasize the African slave trade that supplied laborers for monocultural plantation production in the littoral areas of North and South America and on many Caribbean islands, thus eliding or underplaying the existence and persistence of Indigenous slavery, both in those places in other parts of the Americas. Those habits of thought and argumentation have been abetted and reinforced by the archive's power to tether the two histories of slavery through plenitude, erasure, and obfuscation in how documents are created, stored, and accessed.","PeriodicalId":51566,"journal":{"name":"WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY","volume":"80 1","pages":"355 - 388"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42003538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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