Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760–1840 (review)

Frank Mackey’s newest offering is a comprehensive and complex picture of black Montreal in the eras of slavery and early emancipation. The book’s main contribution is its research base, built upon a herculean archival effort. Thoroughly and prodigiously unearthing the black Canadian past, Mackey’s study is rivaled only by Robin Winks’s seminal The Blacks in Canada in its pure ambition (and I mean this in the best possible sense of the word).

Done with Slavery chronicles several dimensions of the black experience in Canada. Organized both thematically and chronologically, the first four chapters focus on slavery (mostly, though not exclusively, through a legal lens). The middle chapters explore emancipation and the threads of black life in the era of freedom in the realms of work, political culture, the criminal justice system and the interracial arenas of marriage and apprenticeships. The last chapter returns to the rich research base of the book, highlighting the many historical gems that Mackey has unearthed in his archival odyssey, beseeching his readers to help him find “an author or two” to tell these stories.

Mackey’s main argument is that historians of blacks in Montreal perform acts of what he calls “racial recognizance” (perhaps he meant to say “racial reconnaissance,” but this is not clear). And unearthing Montreal’s racial past is precisely what Mackey devotes himself to in the book, thus keeping with the important intellectual/archival spadework that underwrites it. The act of racial recognizance is still important for the enterprise of black Canadian history, a field that for various reasons seems perpetually in an embryonic stage. It is important to clarify, as Mackey does, just who was black and the contours of their day-to-day lives in Montreal society; this is a task that has either largely been ignored by historians working on more mainstream topics or botched by the few scholars who specialize in black Canadian history and the history of blacks in colonial Montreal in particular. Once he has established who was who in black Montreal society, Mackey’s task is to then mine the archives to reconstruct “things as they were,” one of the primary aims of any good historian. Mackey hits this aim with considerable success.

Mackey’s work is an archival triumph and he conducts his mission with considerable aplomb, but like all works of recovery and retrieval, his study has its limitations. “In Quebec’s black past,” Mackey maintains, “little is as it seems on the surface. We must look beneath, immersing ourselves in the sources, and hope that an enigmatic or misleading reference in one will find its explanation or rectification in another.” This might be true in the case of sleuthing in the archives to trace the biographies of elusive and marginal figures, but when historians look to the archives as an oracle from which all pure historical knowledge emanates, the danger is that of antiquarianism. While Mackey often avoids this trap (note, for example, his well-crafted analysis of the central role of Quebec jurists in designing slavery’s demise well before the date of the standard “slavery-ended-in-1833” thesis), there is a distinct and disappointing lack of engagement with a rich, multi-disciplinary body of critical and theoretical literature on the black diasporan experience in fields including critical legal studies, critical race theory, theories of the racial state, and black cultural studies. Historians have long understood that archival sources alone cannot give us a complete understanding of, for example, the nuanced and polyvalent expressions of race in the criminal justice system, or the space between formal legal equality and societal inequality under British liberal law. Sometimes race was articulated as straightforward expressions of “bias” and “discrimination” and at other times as its very opposite, mercy. Likewise, in his discussion of the frequency of interracial marriages in colonial Montreal (primarily between white women and black men, Mackey argues that today’s impression that marriages between whites and...