Complexion of Empire in Natchez

In a feat that would be remarkable under normal circumstances, it is especially impressive that historian Christian Pinnen managed to shepherd not one but two books to publication during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: Colonial Mississippi: A Borrowed Land (with Charles Weeks, University Press of Mississippi) and this book, Complexion of Empire in Natchez. The latter work explores a changing Natchez, where over the span of about one hundred years, four different outside powers ruled with varying degrees of success. The French, Spanish, British, and Americans each inflicted systems that relied on stratification based on concepts of complexion. In each instance, Pinnen's exhaustive research reveals Native and African negotiations of the imposed hierarchies. Ultimately, the regime tied to cotton became the most successful and rigid scheme.Pinnen begins his analytical narrative with the French, who envisioned a lucrative agricultural empire built on a subjugated labor force. As with other European powers, their evolving concepts of Blackness provided convenient justification for the regime and a sense of order in colonial society, implemented via the code noir. Pinnen emphasizes that Africans, however, complicated French attempts to manage their empire by mounting legal challenges. Understanding that the French hierarchy of complexion not only clashed with their traditions of captivity but also degraded their own status, the Natchez Indians, in turn, rejected the French hierarchy of complexion. According to Pinnen, the Natchez also interpreted the stratification of complexion in a way that made them natural allies with Africans, with whom they ultimately united to prevent the French from establishing a successful tobacco enterprise in the area. In 1729, as the French stood on the verge of realizing profits in tobacco, the Natchez Revolt obliterated the plantation economy. The involvement of African escapees in this insurrection would for years haunt colonizers with the reminder of the catastrophic potential of Black and Brown people banding together against their oppressors.The British who followed also viewed Natchez as a potentially profitable tobacco plantation region, an extension of their Atlantic plantation economy based on unfree African labor. Pinnen reiterates that “settling Natchez was as much about race as it was about imperial control” (59). Concepts of skin color, culture, and heathenism merged to create a British brand of hierarchy based on complexion. British codification of race and slavery in Natchez began in the 1760s, only tightening over time. Pinnen points out that in a significant departure from the French model, the English system assumed Black people as enslaved by default. Pinnen argues that despite the regime's reliance on enslaved African labor as “the backbone of any agricultural endeavor in Natchez,” enslaved people pressed against the system to the best of their ability (50). However, the restrictions of English law meant that running away offered a better chance of gaining freedom than did most legal suits. Because the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek did not view themselves to be in concert with Africans according to the hierarchy of complexion, Africans were unable to join Indigenous societies to the extent that they did elsewhere with other Native nations, like the Seminole.Gaining control of Natchez in 1779, the Spanish also proved intent on using African descent to justify slavery and drew distinctions of complexion by officially prohibiting colonists from enslaving Native Americans. While the Spanish regime differed from the French and English, Pinnen shows that two pillars continued to uphold the colonial foundation: profit and complexion. The model of slave-grown tobacco grew (despite some logistic challenges) thanks to royal tobacco subsidies and tariff-free slave importation. Despite their subjugation due to complexion, nonwhite people in this Spanish colonial structure enjoyed greater access to courts than they had under English law. The hierarchy of complexion subjected African people to slavery but also recognized them as subjects of the Crown and souls for the Catholic Church. Africans in Natchez understood and negotiated this system. In their wrangling for some self-determination or outright freedom, enslaved and free women of color, for example, carefully selected the godparents of their newly baptized children from among powerful whites, establishing advantageous fictive kinship networks.Finally, the United States' acquisition of Natchez via the 1795 Treaty of San Lorenzo accelerated the growth of the cotton economy and ushered in new complexion rules. As Pinnen explains, under US law “phenotype became a total, all-encompassing marker” in Natchez for the first time (184). Although enslaved people did not cease to challenge the system, they increasingly worked within that system as individuals and in their claims to freedom acknowledged the legitimacy of slavery based on complexion. Readers will be more familiar with this last part of the story—the development of cotton capitalism—which has received renewed interest by many historians in the last ten years or so. Complexions of Empire contributes an exploration of one locale before and early on in this transformation without taking it as a given.Besides the book's mastery of a wide breadth of sources to provide a rich narrative of so many different actors, the highlight of the work is Pinnen's emphasis on African (and Native) people's resistance to and shaping of each colonial system imposed on them. Their successes did not disprove the strength of hierarchies of complexion but did demonstrate the flexibility and liminality of colonial projects. Although there are portions of the work in which concepts of complexion could be a bit more tightly connected to the events described, the book offers a rich history of how Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans shaped the manifestation of race, slavery, and empire

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