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Hayes, Katherine H. Slavery before Race: Europeans, Africans, and Indians at Long Island's Sylvester Manor Plantation, 1651-1884. New York: New York University Press, 2013.
The title of anthropologist Katherine Howlett Hayes's book and what it actually argues address two very different issues. As the title Slavery before Race confirms, Hayes views American racism as the product of slavery in colonial New York, not as its cause. Colonial elites created and enforced racial categories and laws, not because underlying prejudices, but "to prevent the loss of slave increase and more generally to prevent a collaboration [between enslaved Africans and Indians] that the colonists perceived as dangerous." 1 This idea that American racism followed (not preceded) the consolidation of slavery was popularized by Edmund Morgan's classic study of the rise of slavery in colonial Virginia, American Slavery, American Freedom. Hayes's study applies Morgan's reasoning to slavery in colonial New York, where Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans coexisted as unfree laborers. Only when they threatened to collaborate against their oppressors did authorities harden racial lines.
Hayes's foray into the debate over the origins of racial slavery, however, does not receive the bulk of her analysis. She focuses more incisively on the creation of historical knowledge and the ways that nineteenth-century scholars manipulated the stories they told to advance selfserving versions of the past. Hayes's penetrating interdisciplinary analysis shows that the nineteenth-century stewards of Sylvester Manor as well as local historians collaboratively distorted the history of colonial Long Island, emphasizing the region's antislavery leanings and fairness toward Indians, while excluding clear evidence that slavery and Indian removal persisted well into the nineteenth century. She...