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Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865. By Christopher Tomlins. New York: Cambridge University Press. 636 pp. $36.99 paper.
By any accounting, Christopher Tomlins's Freedom Bound is a remarkable work. Tomlins offers a new understanding of the relationship of law, labor, and colonization in the structuring of the American polity and society from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. He meticulously analyzes the practices, rules, and relationships that shaped the colonizing process in the political imagination and on the ground; he makes clear that the material construction and reconstruction of colonial societies and populations took precedence over any plans set down in London. In the process, he also deconstructs any retroactive fantasies about early America as a realm of golden opportunity for all.
But as even a cursory attention to the baroque writing and dispersive structure of Freedom Bound will suggest, Tomlins aims at something more than a reinterpretation of British America's colonizing past. Freedom Bound presents itself as a model for a new sort of historical materialist legal history, one simultaneously reductionist and fantastical, overwhelming in its attention of law's detail yet dismissive of law's autonomy, sensitive to the political frame of societies yet ultimately skeptical that they make much difference at all. In all of these philosophical and methodological transgressions, Tomlins writes under the sign ofWalter Benjamin whose essays and Arcades Project serve as provocation for Tomlins' efforts. As Tomlins has indicated elsewhere, he is seeking to re-imagine the history of the law; to examine it under the microscope of justice while detailing its complex inter-penetrations (not intersections) with other structures of human experience (Tomlins 2010).
And yet, in the end, there is a fracture at the heart of Freedom Bound. For the historical story that Tomlins tells, and the theoretical vision that he seeks to instill, do not, ultimately, cohere. Benjamin wrote, in an essay crucial to Tomlins' conception of the history of law, "The historical materialist blasts the epoch out of its reified 'historical continuity,' and thereby the life out of the epoch, and the work out of the lifework. Yet this construct results in the simultaneous preservation and sublation [Aufhebung] of the lifework in the work, of the epoch in the lifework, and of the...