Description:
Cambridge University Press, 2010. Paperback. Good.
Freedom, as a word, has enjoyed an excellent publicist. It sounds noble, uplifting, almost self-explanatory. One imagines ringing declarations, upright citizens, and a steady march toward liberty beneath a broad moral sky. Christopher Tomlins, quite sensibly, arrives to point out that in colonising English America the reality was rather messier: freedom for some, bondage for others, law everywhere, and labour doing most of the actual lifting.
Freedom Bound – Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (2010) is not here to offer a comforting myth about liberty blooming naturally in the New World like some particularly self-righteous flower. Instead, it takes the long, hard route through the legal, social and economic machinery by which English America—and later the United States—defined who counted as free, who counted as bound, and who had the power to make that distinction stick. Which is…
Read more