Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island by Christy Clark-Pujara (review)

Christy Clark-Pujara’s Dark Work uses a case study of Rhode Island to engage in the popular field of the history of capitalism, arguing that capitalism and slavery “far from being separate and incompatible systems were utterly interdependent” (2). In support of this claim, Clark-Pujara employs the phrase “business of slavery” to describe Rhode Island’s extensive economic commitment to slavery. She defines the “business of slavery” as “all economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, food, and goods. The business of slavery, as distinct from the institution of slavery, allowed New England to become an economic powerhouse without ever producing a staple or cash crop” (2). Referring to such economic connections as the business of slavery is a much-needed intervention in the current debate surrounding the economic role of slavery and its relationship (or lack thereof) to capitalism. Clark-Pujara looks beyond the more familiar histories of cotton and other cash crops to examine the much-broader reach of the slave system. Far from being limited to the cotton, tobacco, or sugar-growing South, the economic influence of slavery could be felt across North America and the world. Importantly, Clark-Pujara also ties the economics of slavery to its social ramifications and to the legal status of enslaved and free African Americans in Rhode Island. The business of slavery, she points out, had a significant “effect on the ‘lived experience’ of enslaved and later free people” (3).

Rhode Island, while the smallest state in the North, played a significant role in, first, the Atlantic slave trade, and, then, the supply of foodstuffs and textiles to the South as well as the Caribbean. Clark-Pujara argues that “Newport would become the most important slave-trading port of departure in North America,” with Rhode Island slave traders transporting over sixteen thousand enslaved people to the Americas between 1726 and 1750. The financial success that the slave trade brought to Rhode Island merchants, such as the Brown family, meant that many of Rhode Island’s governors and other civic leaders were involved, in one way or another, in the Atlantic slave trade. Artisans and laborers, too, were tied to the business of slavery, as one slave-trading voyage required an army of laborers and locally produced products, including ropes, sails, caulking, and barrels. Clark-Pujara makes a much-needed argument about the extensive economic web of the slave-trading business; future studies would benefit from taking this observation seriously and supplying more detailed data on the size and scope of such ancillary businesses and the lived experiences of those laboring in them.

After the economic disruption of the Revolutionary War, an (ineffectual) state ban on the Atlantic slave trade, and then the national ban in 1808, Rhode Island businessmen remained committed to the business of slavery, primarily through the “negro cloth,” or kersey, industry. The Narraganset Country, an agricultural region where the majority of enslaved Rhode Islanders had labored for the provisions trade to the West Indies in the colonial period, transitioned in the early nineteenth century to textile manufacturing. Clark-Pujara discusses in some detail one particular business in the region, Peace Dale Mills. She finds intriguing evidence about the mills’ owners, the Hazards, one member of whom spoke out against the Fugitive Slave Law while maintaining close business and personal relationships with his slaveholding customers. Mill owners such as the Hazards also refused to employ African American laborers, leading Clark-Pujara to argue that “Northern kersey mills thus manufactured class and race in antebellum America both figuratively and literally, shaping the lives of free blacks in the North and enslaved African Americans in the South” (94). Given her fruitful analysis of the Peace Dale Mills, Dark Work could benefit from more examples of and evidence from similar textile manufacturers in Rhode Island.

A significant portion of Dark Work...