Jared Ross Hardesty, Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England

摘要

In Jared Ross Hardesty’s follow up text to his 2016 Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston, Hardesty returns to the topic of slavery, but with a different interest in trying to connect the entangled histories of slavery, colonization, and emancipation in New England. Black Lives, Native Land, White Worlds is organized around the single theme of connections. Hardesty considers “New England slavery was actually part of a wider world of slavery and colonization in the Americas, and was important for the emergence of American industrial capitalism.” (xv) The wider world Hardesty engages still allows him to pay “close attention to the lives of those enslaved in New England and how their experiences related to larger historical processes.” (xv) Black Lives, Native Land, White Worlds is the first synthetic treatment of New England slavery since Lorenzo Johnston Greene’s The Negro in Colonial New England, and Hardesty’s monograph attempts to build on the recent momentum of scholarship on New England slavery and colonization by providing a “short, readable, introduction to New England slavery.” (xv) Hardesty has a keen eye on highlighting the lives of and connections built by enslaved New Englanders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.