Important & Interesting

The thesis of the author is that one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, for the Independence movement in British colonial America was concern about slavery. That the American settlers were afraid that their colonial masters would improve the lot of the slaves & put them on a path towards greater equality or at least prosperity. Its a poweful reading of history & one can see why it has not been put forward by traditional, establishment historians. How much nicer is the story about Tax & Tea & those beastly Redcoats!

Its not that the British cared about the welfare of the African slaves. They didnt even care about the colonial settlers. It was Britain's wars with France & Spain that concerned the British state. One tactic used by the French & Spanish to attack the British colonies was to promote rebellion amongst the enslaved Africans & offer them a better life if they defected to Spanish or French colonies. Also the free & enslaved Africans were prized as enlisted soldiers by all sides in these imperial European wars. Whereas the last thing colonists wanted was to arm their slaves or give them a taste of freedom. So it was these concerns that opened or widened the breach between Britain & the American colonists regarding slavery & was likewise a major factor in the subsequent American rebellion, the War of Independence.

This is an important lesson told by a distinguished American historian who brings much scholarly research to his narrative. His style of writing however is a bit long winded, repetitive & overly literary to my mind. Who uses words like "surcease"? Or even know what they mean. Why say "independency" instead of "independence"? Maybe the author has been infected by the literary style of all the old documents he has studied! The result is a good book, well read by the narrator, but it is rather slow moving & repetitive. I recommend the book none the less, as it is full of interesting historical information & the overall historical interpretation is all important.

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difficult

I couldn't finish it. For my own taste, I found it difficult to follow and would lose concentration. That may be the occasional word I didn't know or the frequently long and complicated sentence structure. Chapters did not feel distinct from one another with references bouncing backwards and forwards in time. I'm sure it's incredibly well researched and perhaps I just needed a simpler more concise overview my poor brain to handle.

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National Insecurity

This is a stand-out collection of some fascinating footnotes to history that were probably intended to be buried. The whole assortment of these makes a compelling narrative which shows the scale of real and imagined unrest among colonial Americans at the idea that their brutalised slaves might gain freedom and avenge the wrongs perpetrated against them.

It highlights the pressure of slave revolts on those who were locked into a bind of racialisation and subjugation and concocted ‘whiteness’ to consolidate allies and justify their behaviour.

It also highlights the grave moral and political frictions between London and its colonies over slavehood.

Although the narrative is disjointed, by virtue of the scope of the study, and it sometimes seems like a barrage of facts rather than a cohesive narrative, there were many aspects of this which I am compelled to understand more. And the final analysis - that the ’War of Independence’ was a struggle for slavery and a fear of a black continent - is elucidated in many ways.

Should be part of the school curriculum, but the last thing moral crusaders want to teach is that violence can be a virtue, or that freedom can mean slavery.

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