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Supremacy and the Origins of American Slavery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 October 2019
Extract
Katharine Gerbner has provided readers a much-needed treatment of the relationship between Protestant Christianity and the emergence of White Supremacist racial ideology in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Scholars have long perceived the general outlines of the story that unfolds in Gerbner's book, but no one has highlighted the connective tissues with as much care and detail. With her book, it is now much easier to see what we once could only imagine to be there: Christians (Protestants in this telling) played a singular role in the articulation of a racial ideology that would eventually become a widespread rationale for slavery throughout much of the Atlantic world. There are surprises in this tale, such as the seemingly paradoxical role played by historical actors who scholars often credit with being on the right side of history—the Quakers and Moravians, for example, who are typically cast as characters intent on destabilizing slavery. Not so, according to Gerbner. In this way, she does marvelously well to show how Protestant Christianity was never really above the fray and that those we might like to imagine were the progenitors of an eventual antislavery critique were also critical conduits in the development of modern-day racism.
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References
2 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 39.
3 John Bale, Vocacyon (1553), 12v–14, cited in McKisack, May, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 22Google Scholar; and John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithful and Trewe Subjectes (1559), excerpted in British Pamphleteers, ed. George Orwell and Reginal Reynolds (London: Allan Wingate, 1948), 37.
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5 John Bale, The Epistel Exhortatory (1544), cited in Hadfield, Andrew, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61Google Scholar; Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjects, in British Pamphleteers, ed. Orwell and Reynolds, 32; and Hughes, Paul L. and Larkin, James F., eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), 3:13–17Google Scholar.
6 John Hare, St. Edward's Ghost (1647), cited in MacDougall, Hugh A., Racial Myth in English History: Trojans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982), 60Google Scholar.
7 Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605), 43. Verstegan took umbrage with those who doubted the purity of English blood by virtue of the arrival of Danes and Normans over time. “I answere,” he wrote, “that the Danes and Normannes were once the same people with the Germans, as were the Saxons; & wee not to bee accompted mixed by having only som such joined unto us againe, as somtyme had one same language and one same original with us”: Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, 187.
8 Gerbner, Christian Slavery, 39.