Social Networks and Social Worlds

This essay argues that the “slave community” paradigm obfuscates alternative lived experiences for enslaved men and women, especially those living in the urban areas of the early modern Atlantic world, and uses eighteenth-century Boston as a case study. A bustling Atlantic port city where slaves comprised between ten and fifteen percent of the population, Boston provides an important counterpoint. Slaves were a minority of residents, lived in households with few other people of African descent, worked with laborers from across the socio-economic spectrum, and had near constant interaction with their masters. Moreover, slavery in Boston reached its zenith before the American Revolution, meaning older, pre-revolutionary and early modern notions of social order—hierarchy, deference, and dependence—structured their society and everyday lives. These factors imbricated enslaved Bostonians in the broader society. Boston’s slaves inhabited multiple “social worlds” where they fostered a rich tapestry of relations and forms of resistance.