Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom: Mulattoes & Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America by A.B. Wilkinson (review)

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2022-05-09 02:53Z by Steven

Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom: Mulattoes & Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America by A.B. Wilkinson (review)

Journal of Social History
Volume 55, Number 3, Spring 2022
pages 801-803

Max Speare
Saddleback College, Mission Viejo, California

Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom: Mulattoes & Mixed Bloods in English Colonial America. By A.B. Wilkinson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2020. x plus 336 pp. $26.99).

In Blurring the Lines of Race & Freedom, A.B. Wilkinson adds to a growing field of scholarship questioning the genesis of ideas and production of race and social differences in the trans-Atlantic world. Wilkinson’s detailed examination looks at the ways mixed-heritage people—or individuals with at least two ancestors from predominantly African, European, and Indigenous backgrounds—shaped legal and cultural understandings of interracial mixture in British North America. He focuses on the meeting of communities around the Tidewater Chesapeake, the Carolina Lowcountry, and the English sugar and coffee plantations in the Caribbean. Despite legislators in these regions governing monoracial categories of colonial subjects as “white,” “Indian,” or “Negro,” Wilkinson convincingly argues that people from these blended ancestries and their families complicated racially bound labor systems of enslavement and indentured servitude. In so doing, they slowed down elites’ establishment of a solid racial hierarchy from the seventeenth century until the eve of the American Revolution.

Wilkinson’s sources range across multiple genres that reveal Anglo-Americans’ increasing hostility towards people of blended ancestries and interracial relationships. His interrogation of hundreds of fugitive slave and servant advertisements shows some of mixed-heritage people’s strategies for performing freedom and racial passing. Wilkinson uses many court cases showing that mixed-heritage people could successfully challenge the conditions of their labor arrangements through freedom petitions, particularly when Anglo-Americans’ racial thought was in its infancy and when colonial authorities held more lenient notions of hypodescent, a concept that served as a forerunner for the United States’s one-drop rule and miscegenation laws. Whether someone achieved manumission or lessened indentured service contracts was often based on perceptions about an individual’s proximity to European heritage, and most likely passed on through their mother’s lineage…

Read or purchase the review here.

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