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Reviews in American History 33.4 (2005) 501-509



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Might Makes White

Thelma Wills Foote. Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 334 pp. Maps, tables, charts, notes, and index. $72.00 (cloth); $27.50 (paper).

With this dense and somber book, Thelma Wills Foote joins the growing number of historians who have wondered what made colonial America colonial. Unlike most of those historians, however, Foote centers her analysis on Africans rather than Native Americans and she challenges scholars to put America's early history in the context of other harsh colonial regimes. Foote is deeply committed to uncovering the links between the inequities of the present and their historical bases. The roots of contemporary racism, she argues, can be clearly found in the processes of racial formation that she describes for the eighteenth-century city.

Since none of Foote's Europeans or Africans were native to New York, the interplay of politics and race between these two immigrant groups reveals a very different explanation for the origins of race in America than that offered by the historians who have recently examined North American colonialism. By focusing on enslaved Africans rather than indigenous peoples, Foote reveals stark divisions of power between white colonial elites and black laborers. Unlike colonial projects in South Africa or India, for example, colonial elites in British America were always settlers, rarely natives. Thus the mediators, negotiators, and "middle ground" that we usually find in other colonial encounters are not relevant to Foote's story. Instead, Foote successfully makes the colonial state itself a major player in the racialization of what will become the United States. Her perspective is thus more structural and institutional than it is social or cultural.

Foote offers a history of "racial formation," not of African-Americans or even of slavery. Describing lived experience is only a marginal byproduct of her ultimate goal. Foote's most interesting question, and the one that forms the base of the book, is about how "race" developed in a colonial context. Rejecting the terms of the "origins debate," she bypasses the question of labor altogether to examine instead the ways that "the project of colony building required ever more fixed identificatory boundaries, including increasingly [End Page 501] rigid constructions of race" (p. 4). "Race," Foote notes, has "seldom, if ever, been deployed apart from the diffusion of power and the individual's subjugation to the disciplinary mechanisms that regulate everyday life" (p. 6). In other words, it is impossible to separate the division of peoples into racial categories from the political exercise of power. This insight, drawn in large part from the work of postcolonial theorists, makes the idea of race and the process of "racialization" fundamental to the political as well as economic development of the eighteenth-century American colonies. It is a convincing and important argument.

Foote takes New York City as a case study for a political imaginary of complete binaries in which "the state" draws an unambiguous line between white and black. She argues that "race" (both blackness and whiteness) was constructed by the colonial state as a way of controlling and managing various kinds of settler conflicts directed against the government and its representatives. Throughout the book, Foote reveals the cleavages that always existed among white settlers, and then explains how the colonial government repeatedly and deliberately used anti-black racism to promote an idea of whiteness that would unite the settler population in support of its always-tenuous government.

Power, as republican theorists knew long before Foucault, always seeks and is never satisfied. Foote's deft appropriation of this insight is never more evident than in her discussion of New York's numerous political and racial upheavals, particularly Leisler's rebellion in 1689, the slave uprising of 1712, the suspected slave conspiracy trials of 1741, and ironically, the American Revolution itself. In each of these moments, Foote demonstrates how the events themselves were far less meaningful to the colonial state than their after-effects.

Foote opens her study with...

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