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Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America. By Peter Dorsey. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 276. Cloth, $43.95.)
Eighteenth-century British North Americans, who benefited from some of the highest standards of living and greatest political and religious freedoms in the Atlantic world, found themselves, in the 1770s, sitting in coffee houses, sipping tea infused with sugar, smoking pipes of tobacco, wearing indigo-dyed clothes - and denouncing "slavery." By that term they did not mean the real slavery of some half-million people of African descent on the North American mainland, but rather a metaphoric slavery that, in their fevered imaginations, threatened the political liberties of people of European descent.
The spectacle has long fascinated and repelled observers. From Samuel Johnson's famous quip in the 1 770s to the great scholarship in the late 1960s and 1970s by Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis, Winthrop Jordan, and others, these slave drivers yelping for liberty have generated penetrating commentary. The literary scholar Peter Dorsey now launches himself into the mix with a stimulating and frustrating study, the most detailed exploration to date of what he calls "the slavery metaphor" in British North America.
Dorsey makes a strong case for a venerable historical interpretation: that the Revolution undermined slavery. The slavery metaphor - by its own internal logic - pulled down the barriers between political and chattel slavery, between slavery as figure of speech and slavery as coerced labor, and led, almost inevitably, to abolition in the North and a wave of emancipation in the South. Dorsey shows how this process worked, in part, through the operation of language itself. Drawing on theories of metaphor, he recruits an array of thinkers...