Overview

In Spaces of Enslavement, Andrea C. Mosterman addresses the persistent myth that the colonial Dutch system of slavery was more humane. Investigating practices of enslavement in New Netherland and then in New York, Mosterman shows that these ways of racialized spatial control held much in common with the southern plantation societies. In the 1620s, Dutch colonial settlers brought slavery to the banks of the Hudson River and founded communities from New Amsterdam in the south to Beverwijck near the terminus of the navigable river. When Dutch power in North America collapsed and the colony came under English control in 1664, Dutch descendants continued to rely on enslaved labor. Until 1827, when slavery was abolished in New York State, slavery expanded in the region, with all free New Yorkers benefitting from that servitude. Mosterman describes how the movements of enslaved persons were controlled in homes and in public spaces such as workshops, courts, and churches. She addresses how enslaved people responded to regimes of control by escaping from or modifying these spaces so as to expand their activities within them. Through a close analysis of homes, churches, and public spaces, Mosterman shows that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the region's Dutch communities were engaged in a daily struggle with Black New Yorkers who found ways to claim freedom and resist oppression. Spaces of Enslavement writes a critical and overdue chapter on the place of slavery and resistance in the colony and young state of New York.

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9781501715624

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Mosterman offers an in-depth study of the often-overlooked spaces where enslaved people lived and labored to demonstrate that proximity highlighted the disparities between enslavers and the enslaved and was used as a tool of oppression. * William and Mary Quarterly * A welcome corrective to the history of slavery in New Netherland—and, more generally, in the North— underscoring that the lived experiences of those in bondage there were neither static nor monolithic. * New York History *

Author Information

Andrea C. Mosterman is Associate Professor of Atlantic History and Joseph Tregle Professor in Early American History at the University of New Orleans. Mosterman's articles have appeared in, among others, The Journal of African History and Early American Studies.

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