Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World by Michael Guasco (review)

In his polemical riposte to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Thomas Paine declared it to be an unspeakable violation of the natural rights of man that one person should be owned as the property of another. In the antebellum United States, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison seized on the point and banged it like a sledge as part of a broadening indictment of the antebellum South and its slaveholding planters. Looking around the globe for most of human history, eyes less partisan and rationalist and more particularistic and historical might well have concluded, however, that the condition most natural to man was servitude, not personal freedom: that human beings owned other human beings long before positive law emerged to regulate the practice. Michael Guasco knows that in Tudor and Stuart England, Englishmen embarked on voyages of discovery and settlement less-than-enthused about enslaving anyone. In fact, they gloried in their liberties, which set them apart, they fiercely argued, from other peoples in continental Europe and elsewhere. Yet from Albion’s planted seed arose on the North American mainland and in more than a dozen other English colonies across the Atlantic the most impressive and extensive crop of slaveholding plantations in the Americas. In this intelligent and informative book, Guasco examines the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to understand how a freedom-loving people with a cluster of not always consonant views about human bondage came to think about and ultimately embrace the practice of racial slavery.

In Anglo-Saxon England, slavery proved to be widespread, with slaves in some counties numbering perhaps twenty percent of the total population. After the Norman Conquest, however, slavery declined for reasons that remain fuzzy, although villeinage and other extreme forms of bondage survived even as the common law failed to recognize that most ignominious status: slavery. Yet, as Guasco underscores as the central theme of his book, early modern English thinking about slavery and the confrontations of Englishmen with it, inside and outside of England, helped prepare the way for English settlers across the Atlantic “to take advantage of human bondage to construct and preserve” (5) enduring colonial edifices through their interactions with strangers, especially Africans. Guasco’s study reveals the difficulty English thinkers had in drawing precise distinctions between extreme forms of dependency, in reconciling ideals with practice, in justifying who and under what conditions others became suitable for enslavement, and in crossing a perceptual threshold already crossed generations before by the Spanish and Portuguese.

Cultures differ on the meaning of ownership. Property has different forms. Early modern Englishmen did not regard it as merely a legal fiction. Recall that John Locke, one of the last major Western thinkers to justify slavery, in the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669), declared that a freeman had “absolute power and authority over his negro slaves” and in his Second Treatise noted under the category of servants “a peculiar” one called slaves, who by “the right of nature [are] subjected to the absolute dominion and arbitrary power of their masters.” Yet Locke never denied that a civil society could regulate by positive law that which existed absolutely by natural right. Regulation implies withdrawing by the state certain sticks in the bundle of legally enforceable claims that confer in aggregate on individuals or corporate entities absolute dominion over the other. Thus, Locke openly stated his preference that enslavement not be a heritable status. In contrast, slaveholders, already attached to the idea of the private ownership of landed property in the freehold, came to defend resolutely in the colonies the absoluteness of their dominion in that other key factor of production, labor, including the private ownership of their chattel’s progeny. In the Early Modern period, as Guasco discovered, Englishmen recoiled in particular at the commercial use of slaves. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, in response to external consumer demand, colonists realized by...