| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas Murphy. Jesuit Slaveholding in Maryland, 1717–1838. (Studies in African American History and Culture.) New York: Routledge. 2001. Pp. xxv, 258. $75.00.

A definitive treatment of its subject, Thomas Murphy's book is a fine example of history writ small. Given that Maryland members of the Society of Jesus owned fewer than three hundred slaves, one might expect this book to interest only a small circle of experts. In fact, the very uniqueness of the Jesuit tobacco plantations helps to highlight, by way of contrast, the more typical practices of other slave-based operations. For almost two centuries, Jesuits nourished an "exceptional institution," unusual even by southern standards. Murphy argues that Jesuits held slaves, both in colonial and postcolonial times, to serve their own purposes, but not mainly in order to amass wealth. Slave ownership allowed Society members a means of protection in an often anti-Catholic environment. Jesuits embraced plantation life to achieve economic security and social respectability and to secure places safe for Catholic worship. Jesuit slaveholding even survived the church's official suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. . . .

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