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Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce-the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, the volume merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora.
The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.
List of contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1: Buying Oroonoko in Salem: Sentimentality, Spectacle, and the Salem Social Library
- 2: 'Whatever is, is Right': The Redwood Library and the Reception of Pope's Poetry in Colonial Rhode Island
- 3: They Were Prodigals and Enslavers: Patriarchy and the Reading of Robinson Crusoe at the New York Society Library
- 4: Slaves as Securitized Assets: Chrsyal, or, The Adventures of a Guinea, Paper Money, and the Charleston Library Society
- 5: 'See Benezet's Account of Africa Throughout': The Genres of Equiano's Interesting Narrative and the Library Company of Philadelphia
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
About the author
Sean Moore is the Editor of the international journal Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is the author of Swift, the Book, and the Irish Financial Revolution: Satire and Sovereignty in Colonial Ireland (Johns Hopkins UP, 2010), which won the Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book from the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS). He has published in PMLA, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Atlantic Studies, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, and other journals and essay collections. He was a Fulbright Scholar to Ireland as a graduate student, and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), American Antiquarian Society (AAS), Library Company of Philadelphia, Folger Library, John Carter Brown Library, Newport Mansions, and other institutions.
Summary
This volume explores how profits from slavery underpinned the dissemination of British literature in America during the eighteenth century and how the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital.
Additional text
Moore's readings are well-considered and compelling, acquiring considerable force both in themselves and through their contexts...That Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries suggests diverse further angles of inquiry is a testament to the interest and power of what it accomplishes. It provides convincing proofs of its thesis, fruitful readings of its chosen texts, rich seams of fascinating evidence, and an important challenge to its readers, demanding that we recognize ugly truths about the fiscal and ideological underpinnings of early institutional culture.
Report
The power of this overall argument owes its success, as much as anything, to the effectiveness of the book's structure. Each of the book's five chapters has a dual focus: first, on the history of one of the major pre-Revolutionary libraries in the North American colonies, and second, on a particular literary text circulating among that library's members that illuminates a particular community of readers in a unique way. Ezra Tawil, Modern Language Review
