Scholars have published wide-ranging works about slavery, captivity, and freedom in New England during the last fifteen years. As a result of this scholarship, we now know details about the intimate lives, religious experiences, labor regimes, forms of resistance, and military participation of enslaved women and men throughout New England. Some studies have focused on northern port towns’ connections to slavery, slave trafficking, and smuggling across the Atlantic world. Others have examined slavery in rural communities, building on the tradition of town-focused social histories. We now understand that the enslavement of Indigenous people was widespread and lasted well into the eighteenth century. The economic importance of slavery to New England and the ways that slavery shaped race and gender across the region and beyond have been well established. Scholars have also elaborated on how the legacies and memories of slavery long affected the lives of free people in the nineteenth century. Yet many topics remain unexamined.

These three papers, augmented by comments from the chair, present new approaches to the study of slavery and freedom in the region. Chronologically, the three papers move from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. Joanne Jahnke-Wegner examines how Europeans’ enslavement and dispossession of Indigenous peoples served as the foundation for the creation of early modern racial capitalism. The enslavement of people, especially Indigenous women, and land theft during the Pequot War and King Philip’s War, led to “dematriation” and the primitive accumulation of capital that undergirded the development of colonial capitalism. Jared Ross Hardesty shows how wealthy absentee owners in eighteenth-century New England who owned plantations in the Caribbean benefited from enslaved Africans who grew cane, coffee, and cacao. They subsequently invested profits from those plantations in the growing industrial and financial economy of the north. Richard Boles analyzes the meanings of freedom and the political networks and religious institutions that developed out of the convergence of Mashpee Wampanoags and freed African Americans on Cape Cod. This Indigenous and multiracial community fought for their autonomy and rights from the late eighteenth century well into the nineteenth century.

All the participants in this panel presented their early-career research about slavery, captivity, and freedom at a Colonial Society of Massachusetts’ Graduate Forum between 2010 and 2014. Joining together for this panel, they will present portions of their unpublished current research projects.