Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake

These articles provide ample room for reflection on how a tug-of-war between resistance to and assertion of social control led to order and civility in the Chesapeake. * Journal of American History *
This collection from established and emerging scholars offers fresh and sophisticated essays on the beliefs, legal systems, and labor systems of the early Chesapeake. This innovative organization makes the book a fruitful one, not only for scholars, but also for students who can use the essays to compare sources, arguments, and methods. -- Sarah Hand Meacham, Virginia Commonwealth University
This is a fine and provocative collection of essays from a band of largely junior scholars, newly minted Ph.Ds. and the like. All the essays in some way revisit the ‘origins debate,’ and the nature and extent of ‘unfreedom’ in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia and the Chesapeake, with the additional concentration on class and gender. These young scholars have not only produced some new interpretations of old arguments, they shift our attention from the antebellum period and black enslavement, which has dominated much of the scholarship for the last four decades, to the colonial period and unfree, non-black labor, particularly indentured and convict labor. We are reminded of the harsh realities of life for those unable to assert and maintain their legal freedom, such as wives separated from husbands, convict women, or those accused of witchcraft. These essays make abundantly clear that race was far from the primary determining factor in an age when ‘freedom’ was far from universal and exploitation of the powerless was widespread. -- Larry Hudson, University of Rochester