Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.3 | The History Cooperative

The Invention of the White Race. Vol. 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. By Theodore W. Allen. (New York: Verso, 1997. x, 372 pp. Cloth, $60.00, isbn 1-85984-981-4. Paper, $22.00, isbn 1-85984-076-0.)

Theodore W. Allen first discusses how the traditional constraints placed upon English employers gradually broke down in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake with its growing stress upon the chattel nature of servitude, the owners' capacity to alienate their servile property, the establishment of inheritable servile qualities, the absence of specific payments for labor, and increased demands upon the labor time of servants. African American servants were especially abused with the gradual implementation after 1640 of lifelong servitude, often inherited by children through the mother. 1

Although recognizing the planters' predisposition to take advantage of the special vulnerability of African American bond servants, Allen explains their distinctive subjugation to lifetime servitude generically, by placing it in the context of owners often increasing the labor services of bond servants, both European and African American. This enables Allen to avoid dealing with the conundrum of white racism before he is ready to discuss it—that is, when he describes the supposed implementation of true "racial oppression" in the Chesapeake after Bacon's Rebellion (1676): 2

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