Civilizing' the Colonial Subject
The Co-Evolution of State and Slavery in South Carolina, 1670-1739
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2108920 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daragh Grant (University of Chicago, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 57 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 606-636 |
| Publication date | 2015-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Comparative Studies in Society and History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0010-4175 • E-ISSN: 1475-2999 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0010417515000225 |
| OpenAlex | W1704545122 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
| References cited | 87 |
South Carolina was a staggeringly weak polity from its founding in 1670 until the 1730s. Nevertheless, in that time, and while facing significant opposition from powerful indigenous neighbors, the colony constructed a robust plantation system that boasted the highest slave-to-freeman ratio in mainland North America. Taking this fact as a point of departure, I examine the early management of unfree labor in South Carolina as an exemplary moment of settler-colonial state formation. Departing from the treatment of state formation as a process of centralizing 'legitimate violence,' I investigate how the colonial state, and in particular the Commons House of Assembly, asserted an exclusive claim to authority by monopolizing the question of legitimacy itself. In managing unfree laborers, the colonial state extended its authority over supposedly private relations between master and slave and increasingly recast slavery in racial terms. This recasting of racial slavery rested, I argue, on a distinction, pervasive throughout English North America, which divided the world into spheres of savagery and civility. Beneath the racial reordering of colonial life, the institution of slavery was rooted in the same ideological distinction by which the colonial state's claims to authority were justified, with the putative 'savagery' of the slave or of the Indian being counterpoised to the supposed civility of English settlers. This article contributes to the literatures on Atlantic slavery and American colonial history, and invites comparison with accounts of state formation and settler colonialism beyond Anglo-America
Atlantic World · Civility · Colonialism · Ethnology · Ideology · Indigenous · Legitimacy · Opposition (politics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · State formation · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society
Black majority
Slave counterpoint
In the matter of color
Africa Remembered
The English Sugar Islands and the Founding of South Carolina
State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700
Freedom Bound
Economy and Society
Lineages of the Absolutist State
American Slavery, American Freedom
Coercion, capital, and European states, AD 990-1992
Slavery and human progress
The Making of New World Slavery
The Indian Slave Trade
Laboring Women
From the German Ideology
Two Treatises of Government, by John Locke, Peter Laslett
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
Black Feminist Thought
The Wretched of the Earth
Savagism and Civilization
Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800
Economy and Society
State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700
Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History
Africa Remembered
The Indians' New World
African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion
African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion
Travels in the American Colonies
The Police Control of the Slave in South Carolina
White Servitude in Colonial South Carolina
An Appraisal of the Negro in Colonial South Carolina. A Study in Americanization
Colonial South Carolina
Puritans and Adventurers
Nairne's Muskhogean Journals
White Over Black
The Legal Status of the Slave in South Carolina, 1670-1740
Judges, Masters, Diviners
Colonists in Bondage
Slave Patrols
Power and Authority in Seventeenth Century England
Legal Borrowing and the Origins of Slave Law in the British Colonies
How the Irish Became White
Mapping the Margins
Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery
Nairne's Muskhogean Journals
State, Power, Socialism
John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government
Locke, Natural Law, and New World Slavery
Discipline and Punish
Capitalism and Slavery
Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery
The question of 'race' in the pre-colonial southern Sahara
Origins of the Southern Labor System
The British East India Company and African Slavery in Benkulen, Sumatra, 1687-1792
Divide and Rule
Carolina Chronicle
The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century
The Ideology of English Colonization
Before Othello
The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods
The Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Slavery in Indian Country
Primitive Accumulation, New Enclosures, and Global Land Grabs
Beyond 'identity
Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice
John Locke Two Treatises of Government
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,57 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2023 (5) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |