Book Review

In this elegant and thoughtful book, Robert Olwell aims "to illuminate the complex interrelationship between 'Kings & Slaves,' colonialism and slavery, in one early American slave society: the mid-eighteenth-century South Carolina low country" (3). He begins with the assertions that "slavery was from the start a colonial institution" and, more particularly, that South Carolina "was a slave society from the very first" (5). In the low country, as masters and slaves confronted one another within a "system of domination," they created arenas, languages, and rituals that constituted a "culture of power" (6–7). For Olwell, the buildings and ideas constructed at the central crossroads in the colony's capital city--the Statehouse, St. Michael's church, the Town Watch House, and the public marketplace--embodied the "laws" of "God, King, Masters, and Market" (18–19). An examination of these four pillars forms the core of Olwell's text.	1
After an introductory overview of South Carolina from 1740–1775, a synthesis largely based on previous scholarship, Olwell turns his full attention to the transplantation and transformation of English law in the low country environment. With the passage in 1740 of the Negro Act, white Carolinians attempted to align colonial law, including the slave code, with its metropolitan counterpart. However, given slaveholders' practical demands for a judicial system capable of governing the colony's enslaved majority, South Carolina's criminal law evolved into a system that preserved more than individual property rights (so paramount in English common law). Low country legal statutes enacted and enforced a social hierarchy based on racial division. In this second chapter, as throughout the book, the author stresses the full participation of slaves in negotiating their treatment and framing the world in which they lived. "In the slave court justice was a process and not a product." Olwell argues convincingly that "the shackles of the law were forged in the statute book but hammered out in the courtroom through the dialogue between justices and the accused" (82–83).	2
Turning from the bench and bar to the pulpit and pew, Olwell next explores the meaning of Anglican church establishment in South Carolina, masters' and missionaries' contests over the extension of English religion to the enslaved, and the benefits of Anglican communion for a highly select group of Afro-Carolinians. He finds that while religious instruction offered slaveholders a means beyond physical force for controlling their bondsmen and women, most masters believed that it empowered the local clergy and elevated the self-esteem of slaves, thereby undermining the authority of the ruling class. Only a few slaves, Olwell estimates three to five percent of the low country's black population, were baptized in the Anglican church (118). Once accepted into the "Society of Christians," these Anglican slaves, as they sat at the back of the chapel, confirmed their position as social subordinates. Yet, according to Olwell, "slave communicants posed a silent challenge to the Anglican social order. When slaves knelt at the holy table while their masters looked on, the back of the church momentarily became the front" (133–34).	3
In chapters four and five Olwell extends his argument into the marketplace and the plantation arenas. Many low country blacks cultivated private gardens and exchanged their produce for personal property; others sold their labor for profit. Most slaves traded their goods or services with the tacit approval of their masters. Olwell demonstrates, however, that the effects of slaves' participation in South Carolina's economy went much further. As the chief vendors in Charles Town's daily market, slaves dominated the exchange of goods in the low country. In the long term, these agents of trade--enslaved women in particular--routinely challenged white supremacy and patriarchal authority by setting prices, agreeing or refusing to bargain, and accumulating wealth and power. Yet, as Olwell acknowledges, their high stake in the market "may have acted to lessen overt slave rebelliousness in the short term" (179). In his chapter on colonial plantations the author argues that white Carolinians relied upon the culture of power even in their daily assertions of authority over slaves. Masters' control of slaves, codified in the law and manifest in "overt violence," also appeared through the "power of words" and created personal affective ties. "Language and the discursive process constitute," according to Olwell, "Fields of contention in themselves and are a primary locus of struggle between rulers and the ruled" (189–90). With this analytical perspective in mind, Olwell presents and examines a wealth of evidence illustrating how masters and slaves wielded the metaphors of patriarchy to advance their own interests. While his conclusions in this section are highly suggestive, perhaps because of the nature of the evidence, they are not as compelling as in earlier chapters.	4
While the War for Independence threatened South Carolina slaves as both persons and property, it did not much threaten the system of slavery. The British never contemplated full-scale abolition (after all, the Caribbean sugar economy depended upon forced labor), and army leaders embraced emancipation only as a short-term military tactic designed to wreak havoc on republican plantations. Yet the Revolution did transform the low country. In the postwar aftermath, South Carolina's "little kingdoms" became plantation "households" and masters fully embraced the language and practice of paternalism. For blacks however, this transformation constituted "more a restoration than a revolution" (274).	5
Masters, Slaves, and Subjects is an engaging book with an important thesis that the author proves using a remarkable variety of evidence. The strength of the text lies primarily in Olwell's ability to take what historians of colonial slavery already know, contribute his own research discoveries, consider contemporary perceptions and challenge modern myths of real places, and thus create a book that advances scholarly understanding of one "small corner of the early modern Anglo-American world" (3). At just under three hundred pages, this text offers students a wonderful window on early American slavery as both an institution and an experience.	6
Meaghan N. Duff Western Kentucky University

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