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other essential human traits in a state of nature (p. 13). In America, they
believed, they would find markets developing in their purest form. Of course,
as they did with all natural philosophy, Europeans ended up mostly projecting
their own self-interested ideas onto Amerindians and calling them universal.
North Americas Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination,
1580-1850 traces key shifts in European ideas of the Indian trade. Early
colonizers came to America with an idea of the trade heavily influenced by
the remnants of pre-liberal ideas of economic exchange, where the state
intervened to ensure its Indian subjects protection from unregulated trade.
As traders and Indians alike refused to conform to the rules of European
public markets, commenters revised their understanding of Indians, creating
in the last decades of the 1600s the idea of a more liberalized and selfinterested Indian, paving the way for new market ideals of competition and
self-improvement throughout the 1700s (p. 148). As Indians failed, once
again, to flatter Europeans by becoming just like them, Europeans had to
invent some reason why self-interested Indians would reject the cultural
benefits of their trade, using the idea of racial inferiority to explain the trades
failure to live up to Enlightenment ideals.
Colpitts performs some tricky work here, effectively demonstrating how
European ideas and the Indian trade influenced each other in an ongoing
dialogue. In the books strongest moments, he forces the reader to rethink
what the trade meant for Europeans and to reconsider some of their seem
ingly unthinking actions (such as the slew of reforms accompanying the
Proclamation of 1763). In these moments, the trade becomes more than just
another example of European desires to greedily claim and control: there is a
misguided thoughtfulness behind their actions that helps us better understand
the paths that the trade took.
Indeed, it would be better if Colpitts had focused even more on the view
of the trade from Europe. Colpitts frequently leaves behind the realm of
European commentary to offer illustrative examples of how the trade actually
changed between 1580 and 1850. Picking his examples from wide geographic
and temporal ranges, Colpitts does not much improve on what dozens of
other authors have already said about the trade itself. But in those too few
moments when Colpitts sticks to how the trade looked in the European
imagination, he reveals new insights and demonstrates how much work there
is to be done by studying the imagined trade that existed in the essays and
account books of European observers.
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville

R obert P a ulett

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic

World. By Michael Guasco. The Early Modern Americas. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. [viii], 315. $45.00, ISBN 9780-8122-4578-3.)
Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in
English America in the last three-quarters of the seventeenth century: ScotsIrish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans
were pressed into slavery. In a society that flaunted English freedoms at
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THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

home, the introduction of slavery in America allegedly represented a radical

departure. Moreover, by the early eighteenth century the Caribbean islands
and many mainland colonies witnessed the emergence of mature plantation
economies and the growth of racial slavery. Michael Guasco has written a
book to challenge this narrative of two seemingly different moments of
transition. Although the English might have praised themselves for their
freedoms, slavery was an institution deeply entrenched in England and in
English America well before the 1620s. When it came to slavery there never
was a divide between an English metropolitan core and a colonial periphery.
Slavery was constitutive of the English Atlantic from its very inception in the
mid-sixteenth century.
Guasco presents a gamut of events and institutions that rendered slavery
familiar to the English within and without. Penal slavery, forms of inherited
agrarian servitude, and impressment of captured Irish rebels thoroughly
acquainted the English with domestic forms of servitude. The Old Testament,
patristic Christian sources, and the Greek and Roman classics helped rein
force the deeply rooted naturalness of the institution. English travelers pains
takingly reported the near universality of servitude in Portugal, Spain, Italy,
Russia, the Ottoman empire, China, Japan, and Africa. Moreover, tens of
thousands of English sailors became themselves slaves, captured and held
for ransom by Barbary corsairs.
It was the imperial rivalry with Portugal and Spain that familiarized the
English with the institutions associated with African slavery. The English
followed the Spanish and the Portuguese everywhere and learned from them
how and where to obtain slaves in West Africa. Many of the so-called Iberian
slave traders were themselves English rooted in Iberian soil, operating from
Seville or the Canary Islands. Moreover, imperial rivalry provided the English
with an excuse to raid Spanish vessels and ports, hijacking hundreds of slaves who
were later resold back to the Iberians or in England and its emergent colonies.
For Guasco the English connection to Iberian empires created a smug
rhetoric of liberty that cast the English as liberators and the Spanish in
particular as brutal overlords. Indians and Africans appeared as allies of the
English, battling a Spanish slaving antichrist. While liberating the Africans,
the English also learned from Spaniards how to integrate them into house
holds through conversion and miscegenation. Like their Spanish teachers, the
English provided some legal protections for African slaves, including safe
guards for slaves property and for married couples and families, as well as
the right to self-purchase. There were plenty of freed blacks in the early English
Atlantic. Guasco does not mythologize these institutions as they slowly went
away while the plantation regime of racial slavery came of age. For Guasco
there were no sudden transitions from one slave regime to the next. Slavery
of whites or Native Americans (either through penal institutions or captivity
in just war) always had a moral dimension to it. Precapitalist slavery
sought to uplift the captive morally rather than to resolve labor shortages.
In the early English Atlantic, African slaves were from the very beginning
commodities purchased to solve labor needs.
This is a stimulating book, but for a reader acquainted with the narrative of
English freedoms and sharp slave-regime transitions it is not very surprising.
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What is surprising is that this vast world of forced labor regimes would have
remained hidden to the historiography. Early modern polities traded in slaves
and forced labor systems promiscuously. The English were no different, for
all their alleged freedoms. Given the overwhelming number of galley slaves,
Irish captives, pirates, apprentices, indentured laborers, agrarian servants,
child laborers, and late medieval oblates, how could it have ever been possi
ble to imagine the English world as singularly free? The English con
structed a fiction of English freedoms that was no different from that built
by, say, the Spaniards. In fact, Spanish Old Christians enjoyed even more
freedoms than did the English. Old Christians, who battled invading
Islamic overlords by retreating to their Cantabrian strongholds, were entitled
not only to their freedoms but also to the fueros of hidalgos, that is, to the
right to have others work for them. They went one better than the English by
clearly articulating the paradox of early modern freedoms: there were institu
tions of forced labor and slavery so that a handful could be free.
University of Texas at Austin

J orge C anizares-E sguerra

Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic. By Audrey

Horning. (Chapel Hill: Published by University of North Carolina Press
for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013.
Pp. [xx], 385. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-1072-6.)
In Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic,
Audrey Homing challenges the popular conceit that early modem Ireland was
a training ground for English colonial ventures in North America and the
Caribbean. Using archaeological sources from both the Ulster Plantation in
Ireland and the settlements of Roanoke and Jamestown in North Carolina and
Virginia, respectively, Homing suggests instead that these early Atlantic sites
of English empire represent competing examples of colonialism with the sole
link residing in the haphazard character of English attempts to wield control
in both lands (p. 18). By centering material sources in the history of imperial
ism in the English Atlantic world, Horning also provides a fuller accounting of
the lives of ordinary Irish and Native Americans, whose lives are largely elided
in the documentary records, to impress on her readers the importance of local
nuance for understanding events in these early English colonies (p. 366).
Hornings detailed and well-researched book is organized into four
lengthy chapters, each of which reads archaeological findings alongside the
documentary record to disrupt common assumptions about colonialism. For
example, in chapter 1 Horning convincingly argues that the English obsession
with what they viewed as Irish misuse of land (largely as a result of alleged
Irish practices of transhumance, or booleying) does not match the archaeo
logical record: rather, there is considerable evidence for established, nucle
ated settlements throughout late medieval Ireland (p. 34). Chapter 2 uses
archaeology to build on a more recent trend in scholarship that emphasizes
the contingent nature of early colonial ventures in Roanoke and Albemarle.
Homings careful explication of material sources allows her to stress the
longevity of Native identities in the face of disruption, disease, and displace
ment in this region (p. 102). In the third chapter Homing uses archaeology to
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