New England Bound

March 14, 2016
Countering the historiography of colonial New England that’s focused on Puritans and Native Americans, Warren, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, elegantly makes clear how “the shadow of an Atlantic slave trade darkened even the earliest interactions between Europeans and Indians in New England.” Readers familiar with the Salem witch trials will recognize the figure of Tituba, the Carib Indian slave of the community’s minister and the alleged instigator of the rituals that sparked the hysteria; Warren reveals that enslaved Africans were far from anomalous in these colonies, having arrived as early as 1638. Leading New England merchants, many of whom had close ties of kinship and business with the English plantation colonies in the West Indies, were heavily invested in the transatlantic trade in humans. Even less elite residents of these colonies—including sailors, artisans, and farmwives—were aware of and profited, directly or indirectly, from the presence of slaves in their communities. By describing the lived experiences of these slaves, Warren adds a new and surprising dimension to the oft-told story of the New England colonies—one that offers much-needed revision and complication of the simple and comforting myths of intercultural friendship and virtuous endeavor. Illus.

April 15, 2016
A history of the strong beginnings of American slavery in the 17th century.Many of us think of slavery in America as an aspect of the 19th-century Deep South, but Warren (History/Princeton Univ.) astutely shows how New Englanders were quick to join in the buying and selling of both Indian and African slaves. In fact, slavery was an intrinsic part of their economy, unifying the Atlantic world through goods and services bought with earnings off slaves and slave-made products. In 1641, the Massachusetts Body of Liberties formed the basis for slave codes, banning bond-slavery with the exception of "lawful captives taken in just wars." The Massachusetts Bay Colony and other entities exported Indians taken in local wars and imported Africans for whom wars were waged abroad. Indians were unsatisfactory slaves as they were rebellious and prone to escape or suicide. Consequently, Indians were "dumped" in the West Indies in exchange for sugar, tobacco, and African slaves. While some have said New England was key to the Indies economy, which relied on the food and cattle sent along with slaves, the author points out that the colonists were dependent on the profits from property and markets in the Indies. Warren analyzes a wealth of 17th-century correspondence, journals, court records, wills, and other documents, and she has maintained original spelling and grammar in order to save the sense of that world. It certainly accomplishes that, but it may slow some readers trying to understand the context, and Warren occasionally gets bogged down in examples of legal documents, particularly in long lists of wills, revealing estates that included a few slaves. New England slavery was not the same as plantation slavery, where slaves were worked to death for a single crop. Rather, most were sold into domestic servitude, often as a single slave with no community. For students of early American history, this is an eye-opening book about Puritans and Anglicans who disapproved of slavery but accepted it as a normal part of life and reaped its profits.

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May 15, 2016
Most surveys of our peculiar institution of chattel slavery concentrate upon the antebellum South. Warren, an assistant professor of history at Princeton, asserts that both slavery and the slave trade were national in scope and were a fundamental part of the economic and social fabric of the New England colonies, especially in the seventeenth century. To support her thesis, Warren marshals some impressive facts. Even before the large-scale importation of African slaves into Southern colonies, Native Americans were being enslaved in New England, and African slaves were sent to the North by way of the West Indies. Ships built in New England transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic, and the economy of the Northern colonies quickly became tied to the developing slave-based economy of the Southern colonies. Unfortunately, Warren makes some sweeping and highly questionable assertions. For example, despite her confident claim, colonization of the Americas did not make slavery inevitable, any more than other mass migrations have. Still, this is a valuable work that reminds us that the curse of slavery cast a very broad net.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

June 1, 2016

For too long slavery has been exclusively identified with the American South. Long forgotten has been New England's complex relationship with the institution. Beginning in the mid-17th century, New England invested liberally in the slave trade and depended extensively on slave labor, both African and Native American, to create the prosperity that came to fruition in the 18th century. Although similar in the South, slavery in New England differed in some essential elements. Enslaved labor was largely invisible because slave work was indistinguishable from the free labor of their English counterparts, and slaves comprised a small percentage of New England's population. The Puritans were able to build significant wealth through their trading in human chattel. Warren (history, Princeton Univ.) demonstrates that New England merchants successfully integrated their enterprises into the Atlantic trading economy of the 17th century, buying and selling laborers on plantations in the West Indies. It was on the sugar plantations on island colonies where great hardships were endured while working in the hazardous enterprise of sugar production. VERDICT A much-needed correction in the perception of slavery, this work will be enjoyed by those interested in the history of colonial North America and the transatlantic world. [See Prepub Alert, 3/23/16.]--Glen Edward Taul, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2016

A winner of major awards from Yale while she studied there for her PhD and now a tenure-track professor at Princeton, Warren figures among the historians (e.g., Sean Wilentz, Annette Gordon Reed, Maya Jasonoff, and Jill Lepore) who have compelled us to rethink our country's beginnings. Here she shifts the focus on slavery northward, clarifying how the slave trade benefited the Northern colonies, as slave ships anchored at New England ports and prominent families such as the Winthrops profited from their slave-trade investments.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.