Black Lives & Native Lands: Rewriting the History of New England
David Guzman May 5, 2020, Black Perspectives
The study of slavery in New England has experienced something of a
revival in the last decade. Given that New England is often treated as a
hub of liberty after the American Revolution, colonial America
scholar Jared Ross Hardesty joins a number of historians
in dissociating the region from the parochialism and exceptionalism
given to it in earlier studies. In his book, **Black Lives, Native
Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England, Hardesty
convincingly argues that New England should be a part
of a wider story of slavery and colonization in the Americas. Meant as a
synthetic history, Hardesty treads the same path as Lorenzo Johnston
Greene did in his 1942 work,
The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776. Updated with the
latest scholarship on the subject, Hardesty’s work offers a brief and
concise history of slavery in New England.
Utilizing a settler-colonial framework of analysis for much of his work,
Hardesty organizes his chapters chronologically and thematically, first
outlining the origins of sixteenth-century England’s involvement
in slavery and ending with the problems associated
with emancipation in New England. Weaved throughout his narrative are
the themes of oppression, exploitation, enslavement, resistance,
and assertions of humanity. Drawing from newspapers, account books,
letters, autobiographies, and legal documents, Hardesty’s inclusion
of enslaved peoples’ lives greatly enriches and humanizes the narrative
crafted from his rich source of secondary literature. It also reflects
his keen ability to construct the lives, experiences, and pasts
of enslaved men and women even among a scarcity of
documentary evidence.
continue
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absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
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