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Book Review
Canada and the United States
Robert Olwell. Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country, 17401790. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1998. Pp. xvi, 294. Cloth $49.95, paper $17.95.
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In recent years, a good deal of excellent work has appeared on slavery in the South Carolina low country during the early modern period. If some of this work is valuable mainly for extending and elaborating on themes first articulated by Peter H. Wood in his pioneering Black Majority: Slaves in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 to the Stono Rebellion (1974), other studies in this area are bold and original. Robert Olwell's book clearly falls into the latter category. Indeed, in my view, it is one the most insightful and interesting books on early America to appear in some time. |
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At first glance, Olwell's book, picking up as it does in the aftermath of Stono, seems like a useful, if limited temporal extension of Black Majority. That is to say, it seems a sort of southern variant of Edward Cook's work on Dedham, Massachusetts, a community first made famous by Kenneth A. Lockridge in A New England Town (1970). Because Olwell is such a gifted historian, and because he sees so freshly, his book is much more than that, allowing if not compelling readers to view everything in colonial South Carolina, even the seemingly commonplace, anew. |
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