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

Guasco’s study reframes the history of English slaveholding by placing it in the context of human bondage in the early modern English world. Bondage and slavery were, he argues, familiar as ideas and experiences to Englishmen of the period: The early development of slavery does not represent a radical shift but an adaptation of existing models and experiences.

Guasco builds his argument across six chapters. The first chapter maintains that the English were familiar with slavery through the Bible and Protestant theology, through the history and laws of Rome as taught in England’s grammar schools and universities, and through narratives of English history that identified conquerors—Danes or Normans—as enslaving the English. Furthermore, serfdom continued to limit the freedom of a significant number of English men and women during the sixteenth century, and penal slavery was a governmental experiment during the mid-Tudor period.

The second chapter explores English encounters with slavery around the world, particularly in the Mediterranean: The English (however disingenuously) prided themselves on their freedom, but enslavement, particularly of war captives, was familiar. In the third chapter, Guasco turns to the ways in which English privateers attempted to use alliances with Africans against the Spaniards in the Americas. The Africans, however, did not see the English as natural allies; they used them strategically to gain freedom from Spain. The fourth chapter examines the experience of, and narratives about, the “thousands” of English sailors enslaved in the early modern Mediterranean. Guasco suggests that far more of them died than returned; those who managed to return were often treated as apostates, having converted to Islam rather than embrace martyrdom.

The final two chapters look at how slavery was transplanted into English America, from the earliest days onward. Guasco emphasizes the multiple models of slavery available to colonists, its practice in the Spanish colonies, debates about the enslavement of Indians, and the ways in which early colonies adapted bondage to control behavior. When the early colonists began to acquire African slaves, they treated them as slaves before they had legal structures to do so, and only gradually moved away from Spanish models of slavery, with their high levels of manumission. The book thus demonstrates both that English men and women were familiar with slavery and that the ultimate structure of plantation slavery was not a foregone conclusion.

Guasco also examines slavery and freedom in the English imagination. The English had a concept of slavery regardless of any actual practice. He points to the hypocrisy behind the English view of its brand of freedom as uniquely humane. Guasco has read widely, and produced a rich account of the English cultural experience of slavery during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. However, there are blind spots in his coverage. His search for forms of bondage and slavery is not always true to their wider context, particularly their intersection with other historical developments in English society. What is more important, the attempts to enforce villeinage during the sixteenth century or the broad resistance to them from all levels of English society? How were ideas about slavery connected to ideas about gender and sexuality? More importantly, given the political resonance of the concept of slavery in England, what was the political use of such language? Since this book is primarily a cultural history, with an episodic structure, change over time on the English side is not always visible in it, but few historians of England would move as seamlessly as Guasco from the 1540s to the 1640s. Guasco is not, in general, reflective about his methods, or his sources. A bibliography would have helped.

Such caveats, however, do not detract from the significance of Guasco’s work. Slaves and Englishmen provides a persuasive account of bondage in English experience that will challenge historians of both colonial America and early modern Britain.