New England Bound
Slavery and Colonization in Early America
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History
A New York Times Notable Book
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection
A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year
Winner of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award for Social History
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize
Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize
"This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports.
And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
