The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (review)

The title of Boulukos's rich and enlightening book suggests that a review of it in EAL requires a bit of justification. The Grateful Slave, though Anglocentric, is in large part a book about gaps: the gaps between colonial and metropolitan history, the gap between practices and ideas of race, the gap between the heyday of abolitionism and earlier discursive moments in the debate over slavery. In his introduction, Boulukos sets up the stakes of his argument in terms of historiography: while intellectual historians tend to emphasize metropolitan texts in dealing with conceptions of race, social historians have looked to the colonies for the practices of slavery that led to modern ideas of race. Arguing against scholars who read the presence of essential race difference from the moment of European contact with Africans and other non-Western peoples, Boulukos sees difference as culturally and religiously marked in early texts on Africa, and that indeed by the early eighteenth century slavery was still seen as a universal evil in London, and the common humanity of slaves and masters condemned the practice—though this transgression did not provide the impetus for abolitionist efforts until much later. But therein lies the problem: if everyone in the mother country agrees that African slaves are humans, and that slavery is evil, then why does it continue to foster racist ideologies not only in slave-holding colonies but eventually in the metropole itself? According to Boulukos, examining conceptual developments through intellectual history and the institutional practices through social history has amounted to a transatlantic gap in our understanding of the experience of race, and by reading both polemical texts and novels about slavery in light of these two bodies of scholarship, he sets out to account for the intricacies and contradictions of white supremacist culture in the British Atlantic. The trope of the grateful slave, the slave who would rather serve his good master until death than accept manumission, is the microlens through which Boulukos traces these transoceanic trends.

The early chapters provide an overview of the writing on Africa and Caribbean slavery during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, offering both concise syntheses of studies on the institutional development of colonial slavery and deft readings of texts from Leo Africanus's History and Description of Africa to William Snelgrave's New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade (in fine intellectual historical form, Boulukos coins adjectives such as "Snelgravian" to define specific rhetorical stances and ideological positions). Throughout this period, Boulukos shows, both pro- and anti-slavery writers assumed a common humanity with slaves, and the institution's supporters had to turn to environmental phenomena such as the effect of creolization on a slave's willingness to accept captivity to mitigate the fact of slavery's depravity. A chapter on Daniel Defoe's Colonel Jack highlights the novel as the first full-fledged appearance of the grateful slave as a trope, in this case a defense for the sentimental Jack who cannot help identifying with slaves, having himself been an indentured servant (Boulukos points out the term "indentured servant" is an anachronism; Jack was a slave, too). Facing the threat of mutiny due to his unwillingness to punish slaves in his position as overseer, Jack instead resorts to threatening unbearable torture and then telling his potential victims that he has negotiated with his employer for mercy. The slaves express their gratitude in waves of emotional ecstasy, but when Jack tries to do likewise toward his former master, the master refuses to allow Jack, on account of his whiteness, to stoop to such irrational extremes as to devalue his freedom in exchange for protection. The notion that the possibilities of gratitude were different for blacks and whites, Boulukos argues, is the first step in Anglo-American culture toward an ideology of white supremacy that would dominate nineteenth-century debates over slavery.

From Defoe's writings, The Grateful Slave scans...