This eye-opening presentation by historian Jared Hardesty, renowned expert in Massachusetts slavery and unfreedom, opened PHB's 2023 six-part series, Enslavement & Resistance: New England 1620-1760, with a trenchant exploration of the importance of slavery in the colonization of New England.
Although slavery existed everywhere in early America, colonists in New England created a flexible and resilient slave labor system that mixed a variety of other dependent laboring arrangements - indentured servitude, apprenticeship, poor laws, and convict servitude - to address labor shortages. In turn, these enslaved people became ingrained in the colony’s social fabric, giving them access to public goods and a place in society beyond their role as laborers.
This presentation offers an overview of the origins and significance of slavery in early New England. Often overlooked in histories of American and Atlantic slavery, New England was nevertheless an important space for the creation, perpetuation, and refinement of slavery as an institution.
Jared Ross Hardesty is professor of history at Western Washington University and a scholar of colonial America, the Atlantic world, and the histories of labor and slavery. He is the author of three books, Unfreedom: Slavery and Dependence in Eighteenth-Century Boston (New York: NYU Press, 2016), Black Lives, Native Lands, White Worlds: A History of Slavery in New England (Amherst & Boston: Bright Leaf, 2019) and Mutiny on the Rising Sun: A Tragic Tale of Smuggling, Slavery, and Chocolate (New York: NYU Press, 2021). His articles and book reviews have appeared in Early American Studies, Slavery & Abolition, New England Quarterly, and William & Mary Quarterly. Almost all of his peer-reviewed publications have examined the economy, social structure, and global entanglements of 18th century New England.
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