Description
Book SynopsisDuring the first generations of European settlement in North America, a number of interconnected Northeastern families carved out private empires. In Bound by Bondage, Nicole Saffold Maskiell argues that slavery was a crucial component to the rise and enduring influence of this emergent aristocracy. Dynastic families built prestige based on shared notions of mastery, establishing sprawling manorial estates and securing cross-colonial landholdings and trading networks that stretched from the Northeast to the South, the Caribbean, and beyond. The members of this elite class were mayors, governors, senators, judges, and presidents, and they were also some of the largest slaveholders in the North. Aspirations to power and status, grounded in the political economy of human servitude, ameliorated ethnic and religious rivalries, and united once antagonistic Anglo and Dutch families, ensuring that Dutch networks endured throughout the English and then Revolutionary periods.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Manhunt
1. Neger: Race, Slavery, and Status in the Dutch Northeast (1640s–60s)
2. Kolonist: Slaveholding and the Survival of Expansive Anglo-Dutch Elite Networks (1650s–90s)
3. Naam: Race, Family, and Connection on the Borderlands (1680s–90s)
4. Bond: Forging an Anglo-Dutch Slaveholding Northeast (1690s–1710s)
5. Family: Kinship, Ambition, and Fear in a Time of Rebellions (1710s–20s)
6. Market: Creating Kinship-Based Empires United by Slaveholding (1730s–50s)
7. Identity: Navigating Racial Expectations to Escape Slavery (1750s–60s)
Conclusion: Gentry
