Captivity & Whiteness

It’s been a busy November with the end of the semester coming, but I’ve enjoyed reading a new work on anti-trafficking campaigns in the late early modern period. Race Traffic: Antislavery and the Origins of White Victimhood, 1619-1819 is a powerful new study that connects the history of the servant and convict trade in the Atlantic to slavery in the Mediterranean as a way to rethink the contours and meaning of whiteness as a racial category. Barbara Fields once identified the weak conceptual underpinnings of whiteness as a field of study. She remarked that “Whiteness is the shotgun marriage of two incoherent but well-loved concepts: agency and identity.” I had long found her critique useful, and had set the concept aside in my thinking. Yet this work makes a powerful case that I need to revisit it.

Per usual it sent me back to other major books including:

• Thomas Bender, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Chicago, 1992).

• Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: The Foundations of British Abolitionism (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

• Erica Heinsen-Roach, Consuls and Captives: Dutch-North African Diplomacy in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Philadelphia, 2019)

• Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia, 2018).

• Hannah Weiss Muller, Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Oxford, 2017).

• Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America, (Cambridge, 2010).

• Gillian Weiss, Captives and Corsairs: France and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Stanford, 2011).