Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, by Nicole Saffold Maskiell

Reviewed by Emily Holloway

Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry
By Nicole Saffold Maskiel
Cornell University Press
2022, 306 pp.

A recent crop of scholarship on the history of slavery in the northeastern United States, and specifically the role of Dutch settlers in that history, has started to chip away at the long-standing assumptions that slavery in the region was minimal, benign, and brief.[i] Nicole Maskiell contributes to and persuasively expands this conversation in Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry. Maskiell’s innovative approach examines the vast Atlantic networks that supported the infrastructure of enslavement through the prism of family and kinship. Building on the rich and enduring insights of social historians of gender, politics, and slavery such as Jennifer Morgan, Kathleen Brown, and Jennifer Palmer, this book fills a significant gap in the social history of slavery in New York City in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  

Maskiell, an Associate Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, focuses her analysis on the relationships that tethered the elite political and diplomatic networks of Dutch and Anglo-Dutch families to the contested social and kinship networks of those they enslaved. This comparative relational approach adds texture, nuance, and dynamism to the narrative, which toggles back and forth between slaveholder and enslaved. In addition to the entwined social geographies of enslaver/enslaved, Maskiell also explores the ways in which the enslaved were positioned as a sort of cultural currency for slaveholders, particularly among the elite intergenerational merchant families that dominated New Netherlands. In her vivid explanation of this cultural signifier, Maskiell explains how “gifting an enslaved worker with an old gentleman’s hat or coat turned that person into a sort of walking coat of arms for the family,” and furthermore served as a “common language to communicate power to others in their [elite] networks” (6). True to the book’s overall motif of the social and spatial dialogue between enslavers and the enslaved, these cultural practices such as gifts of clothing to enslaved workers could create alternative meanings within enslaved communities and kinship networks.

More than a generation ago, historians of slavery addressed the structural imbalance that shapes the archival record. To reconcile the absence of their subjects’ voices in the archive, scholars adopted an interpretive approach that sought out such silences as the trace of marginalized actors and developed a creative approach to narrate what might have happened in those archival gaps.[ii] Maskiell situates her work squarely within this tradition to reconstruct the stories and struggles of people whose lives are only visible in the diaries, court cases, ledgers, wills, and newspaper advertisements written by their enslavers. These sources are scrutinized and mined to examine how elite networks of Dutch and Anglo-Dutch merchant families were shaped in response to the actions and struggles of the people they enslaved. Maskiell argues that both social groups – the enslavers and the enslaved – built, maintained, and challenged their respective terms of community and belonging, whether through diplomacy or corporate mergers disguised as marriage arrangements or by sustaining regional networks of contacts to foment rebellion and resistance.

The text at times navigates a vast geographic scale, but successfully keeps the narrative grounded in the roots of elite Dutch society in seventeenth century New Netherlands. One chapter is particularly successful at capturing Maskiell’s ambitious and creative narrative approach: a social microhistory of the interconnections between Albany merchant Robert Livingston and his enslaved property, a man named Tom.

Maskiell skillfully positions the entangled histories of these men at the center of significant geopolitical changes across the Atlantic World. The overall book project seeks to illuminate the incremental and cumulative changes along with the continuities linking Dutch colonial practices to English colonial institutions in the transition from New Netherlands to New York. The chapter, titled “Naam” (“Name”) documents Livingston’s rising fortunes as an Anglo settler who married into a prominent Dutch family to draw together these complex and shifting dynamics. Maskiell creates a vivid portrait of the unstable political alliances and colonial geographies in the Northeast, illustrating how European wars over royal succession in England affected the everyday micropolitics of domestic life in a distant colony. 

Robert Livingston’s enslaved worker, Tom, becomes part of the Anglicization of Dutch colonial life through marriage. Previously inherited as part of Livingston’s wife Alida Schuyler’s estate, Tom and Robert created and maintained parallel trading networks that stretched from the Caribbean to New England. And while the archival evidence documenting Robert’s vast commercial network is found in collections and libraries across New York, Tom’s historical presence can only be detected in the court records detailing Tom’s legal transgressions or in the Livingston-Schuyler family diaries and letters. Tom frequently accompanied Robert on his trips from Albany to New York City, where the Livingston-Schuyler family traded commodities such as furs, tobacco, rum, and linens. Tom’s “shadow” trade networks traced these routes as well, and he worked with enslaved and freed Black contacts as well as some Dutch women to exchange items from the Livingston household for more valuable and mobile goods such as tobacco or rum. In an excerpt from Tom’s legal testimony, Maskiell outlines how this chain of trade, from Alida Schuyler’s neighbors to Tom’s city contacts, required the neighbors to “take the time to painstakingly remove the identifying marks on the shirts with a needle” (66) before they could be traded or sold in the underground market.

In 1682, Robert Livingston would be charged to pay fines for Tom’s legal transgressions after he was charged for “theft” of the household items described above. And although Robert also engaged in illicit and clandestine trade activities at times, the protections afforded by racial hierarchies protected him from the law. Drawing on Andrea Mosterman’s pathbreaking research on the geographic dimensions of Northeastern slavery, Maskiell notes that the networks established by enslaved people like Tom were gradually eroded by increased surveillance and more punitive enforcement by colonial officials during the English political transition in the region. In addition to political upheavals in Europe that remapped colonial territories, Dutch and English settlers in the Northeast contended with domestic challenges to their borders. The general unrest fostered opportunities for enslaved people to rebel, escape, and establish and stretch their social networks across the region. Colonists launched an aggressive campaign to clamp down on the mobility of enslaved people and adopted the more punitive aspects of English law. These shifts in the legal frameworks governing the rights and access of the enslaved provided the basis for later legal codes in New York, such as lantern laws (that required non-white residents to always carry a lantern and thus be surveilled at night) or tight restrictions on public gatherings for both enslaved and free Black people.

Bound by Bondage packs an enormous amount of information into a brisk 160 page narrative. Maskiell takes great care to contextualize and reflect on the evidence she draws on and provides an important service to other scholars in the field by translating many of these archives into English. The text makes a valuable contribution by mining these vast records for the lives and stories of New York’s enslaved communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Scholars coming from the history of New York, Atlantic history, and the history of slavery will benefit from Maskiell’s rigorous and creative accounting of this period.

Emily Holloway is a PhD candidate in Geography at Clark University. Her research focuses on the relationship between Caribbean slavery and the industrial built environment of the Brooklyn waterfront.

[i] See for example, Andrea C. Mosterman, Spaces of Enslavement: A History of Slavery and Resistance in Dutch New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021); Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherlands Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

[ii] See for example, Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12(2): 1-14, 2008; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (New York: Beacon Press, 1996).