Virginia 1619: Slavery and Freedom in the Making of English America ed. by Paul Musselwhite et al. (review)

Colonial Virginia holds a special place in the history of the United States and the popular imagination of most Americans. Its foundation rests on two well-known pillars that would seem, at least on the surface, to contradict each other. The General Assembly, the first representative self-governing body in the Americas, illustrates a particular spirit of participatory democracy that animated the colony's early history, at least in comparison to other seventeenth-century settings. The exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants, on the other hand, exposes the brutality and depth of unfreedom that equally defined the character of the settlement. That the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown in 1619, the same year the Assembly was established, makes early Virginia a particularly rich environment to probe the interconnected histories of slavery and freedom and consider how they shaped colonialism in the English Atlantic world. Growing out of a conference that Dartmouth College hosted in 2017, the essays in the volume under review, written by senior and junior scholars, require readers to rethink central themes in colonial American history. They collectively reveal how slavery and freedom were born together, and not by accident. The volume interrogates ideas—about people, gender, space, race, work, community, and the environment—that influenced English perceptions of the Americas and describes the practices that both fueled and disrupted colonists' often-utopian visions of the "New World." Many contributors stick closely to the title's narrow spatial and temporal boundaries; others are more wide ranging in their coverage.

The thirteen chapters are not formally organized into larger parts or sections, but they can be loosely grouped according to shared themes. The editors use the introduction to reflect on the meaning of 1619, whose significance, they note, "lies in the extraordinary conjunction of events that ultimately gave definition to the English colonial project and shaped American society for centuries to come" (9). While they acknowledge the uncertainty and messiness that were such prominent realities of colonial decision-making, what emerged in Virginia, they assert, was no mere "jumble of tragic coincidences, but the interweaving of ideology, pragmatic experience, and international rivalries" that "fed into, and were shaped by, local contingencies in Virginia and elsewhere around the Atlantic rim" (12). Situating the colony in such diverse contexts is a complex task that is particularly well suited to an edited collection.

Contributions by Peter C. Mancall, Lauren Working, and Nicholas Canny assess, to varying degrees, pre-1619 ideas about Virginia, targeting its natural world, Indigenous inhabitants, and prospects for settlement. In the wake of England's flailing early efforts to establish a permanent foothold in the Americas, advocates for continued colonial expansion sought novel ways to drum up financial and moral support for their cause. Man-call describes how a simple picture that the younger Richard Hakluyt, one of England's great collectors of information about the wider world, gave to the naturalist Edward Topsell took on new meaning in this context. The gift, an image of a "virginia bird," represented one of the many foreign and exotic objects of which Europeans tried to make sense. Something so seemingly mundane as the discovery of a new bird, plant, or other unknown commodity, Mancall suggests, could transform the calculus of colonization. Working's chapter also considers how the English made sense of the Americas, focusing on English-Powhatan encounters and their impact on English political culture. That Europeans characterized as "savage" the Indigenous American societies they encountered is well documented; Working notes, however, that such perceptions provoked larger concerns in London about the shortcomings of the English settlers who inhabited the colony, too. Knowledge about Virginia filtered back into Europe and gave birth to new discourse informed by English ideas about developments in the colony. Canny adds a comparative perspective. While they had prominent differences...