Slavery and the Conceptual History of the Early U.S. State

This essay asks the question: in what way did the enslaved create the modern state? To answer this question, the author examines the production of state space in late colonial and early national South Carolina, arguing that slaves produced the state not only by laboring for South Carolina's government, but also through their daily movement, their role as the object of governing practices, and as a consequence of their everyday challenges to the institution of slavery. Such analysis, the essay argues, not only reveals the important role that unfree labor played in the creation of the modern state, but also permits us to re-imagine how we conceive of and examine early national political development.