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other essential human traits in a state of nature (p. 13). In America, they believed, they would find markets developing in their purest form. Of course, as they did with all natural philosophy, Europeans ended up mostly projecting their own self-interested ideas onto Amerindians and calling them universal.

North Americas Indian Trade in European Commerce and Imagination, 1580-1850 traces key shifts in European ideas of the Indian trade. Early colonizers came to America with an idea of the trade heavily influenced by the remnants of pre-liberal ideas of economic exchange, where the state intervened to ensure its Indian subjects protection from unregulated trade. As traders and Indians alike refused to conform to the rules of European public markets, commenters revised their understanding of Indians, creating in the last decades of the 1600s the idea of a more liberalized and self- interested Indian, paving the way for new market ideals of competition and self-improvement throughout the 1700s (p. 148). As Indians failed, once again, to flatter Europeans by becoming just like them, Europeans had to invent some reason why self-interested Indians would reject the cultural benefits of their trade, using the idea of racial inferiority to explain the trades failure to live up to Enlightenment ideals.

Colpitts performs some tricky work here, effectively demonstrating how European ideas and the Indian trade influenced each other in an ongoing dialogue. In the books strongest moments, he forces the reader to rethink what the trade meant for Europeans and to reconsider some of their seemingly unthinking actions (such as the slew of reforms accompanying the Proclamation of 1763). In these moments, the trade becomes more than just another example of European desires to greedily claim and control: there is a misguided thoughtfulness behind their actions that helps us better understand the paths that the trade took.

Indeed, it would be better if Colpitts had focused even more on the view of the trade from Europe. Colpitts frequently leaves behind the realm of European commentary to offer illustrative examples of how the trade actually changed between 1580 and 1850. Picking his examples from wide geographic and temporal ranges, Colpitts does not much improve on what dozens of other authors have already said about the trade itself. But in those too few moments when Colpitts sticks to how the trade looked in the European imagination, he reveals new insights and demonstrates how much work there is to be done by studying the imagined trade that existed in the essays and account books of European observers.

Southern Illinois University Edwardsville R o b e r t P a u l e t t

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern AtlanticWorld. By Michael Guasco. The Early Modern Americas. (Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. Pp. [viii], 315. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4578-3.)

Historians have been puzzled by the rapid development of slavery in English America in the last three-quarters of the seventeenth century: Scots- Irish indentured laborers, Algonquian prisoners of war, and captured Africans were pressed into slavery. In a society that flaunted English freedoms at

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home, the introduction of slavery in America allegedly represented a radical departure. Moreover, by the early eighteenth century the Caribbean islands and many mainland colonies witnessed the emergence of mature plantation economies and the growth of racial slavery. Michael Guasco has written a book to challenge this narrative of two seemingly different moments of transition. Although the English might have praised themselves for their freedoms, slavery was an institution deeply entrenched in England and in English America well before the 1620s. When it came to slavery there never was a divide between an English metropolitan core and a colonial periphery. Slavery was constitutive of the English Atlantic from its very inception in the mid-sixteenth century.

Guasco presents a gamut of events and institutions that rendered slavery familiar to the English within and without. Penal slavery, forms of inherited agrarian servitude, and impressment of captured Irish rebels thoroughly acquainted the English with domestic forms of servitude. The Old Testament, patristic Christian sources, and the Greek and Roman classics helped reinforce the deeply rooted naturalness of the institution. English travelers painstakingly reported the near universality of servitude in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Russia, the Ottoman empire, China, Japan, and Africa. Moreover, tens of thousands of English sailors became themselves slaves, captured and held for ransom by Barbary corsairs.

It was the imperial rivalry with Portugal and Spain that familiarized the English with the institutions associated with African slavery. The English followed the Spanish and the Portuguese everywhere and learned from them how and where to obtain slaves in West Africa. Many of the so-called Iberian slave traders were themselves English rooted in Iberian soil, operating from Seville or the Canary Islands. Moreover, imperial rivalry provided the English with an excuse to raid Spanish vessels and ports, hijacking hundreds of slaves who were later resold back to the Iberians or in England and its emergent colonies.

For Guasco the English connection to Iberian empires created a smug rhetoric of liberty that cast the English as liberators and the Spanish in particular as brutal overlords. Indians and Africans appeared as allies of the English, battling a Spanish slaving antichrist. While liberating the Africans, the English also learned from Spaniards how to integrate them into households through conversion and miscegenation. Like their Spanish teachers, the English provided some legal protections for African slaves, including safeguards for slaves property and for married couples and families, as well as the right to self-purchase. There were plenty of freed blacks in the early English Atlantic. Guasco does not mythologize these institutions as they slowly went away while the plantation regime of racial slavery came of age. For Guasco there were no sudden transitions from one slave regime to the next. Slavery of whites or Native Americans (either through penal institutions or captivity in just war) always had a moral dimension to it. Precapitalist slavery sought to uplift the captive morally rather than to resolve labor shortages. In the early English Atlantic, African slaves were from the very beginning commodities purchased to solve labor needs.

This is a stimulating book, but for a reader acquainted with the narrative of English freedoms and sharp slave-regime transitions it is not very surprising.

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What is surprising is that this vast world of forced labor regimes would have remained hidden to the historiography. Early modern polities traded in slaves and forced labor systems promiscuously. The English were no different, for all their alleged freedoms. Given the overwhelming number of galley slaves, Irish captives, pirates, apprentices, indentured laborers, agrarian servants, child laborers, and late medieval oblates, how could it have ever been possible to imagine the English world as singularly free? The English constructed a fiction of English freedoms that was no different from that built by, say, the Spaniards. In fact, Spanish Old Christians enjoyed even more freedoms than did the English. Old Christians, who battled invading Islamic overlords by retreating to their Cantabrian strongholds, were entitled not only to their freedoms but also to the fueros of hidalgos, that is, to the right to have others work for them. They went one better than the English by clearly articulating the paradox of early modern freedoms: there were institutions of forced labor and slavery so that a handful could be free.

University of Texas at Austin Jorge Canizares-Esguerra

Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic. By AudreyHorning. (Chapel Hill: Published by University of North Carolina Pressfor the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2013.Pp. [xx], 385. $49.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-1072-6.)

In Ireland in the Virginian Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic, Audrey Homing challenges the popular conceit that early modem Ireland was a training ground for English colonial ventures in North America and the Caribbean. Using archaeological sources from both the Ulster Plantation in Ireland and the settlements of Roanoke and Jamestown in North Carolina and Virginia, respectively, Homing suggests instead that these early Atlantic sites of English empire represent competing examples of colonialism with the sole link residing in the haphazard character of English attempts to wield control in both lands (p. 18). By centering material sources in the history of imperialism in the English Atlantic world, Horning also provides a fuller accounting of the lives of ordinary Irish and Native Americans, whose lives are largely elided in the documentary records, to impress on her readers the importance of local nuance for understanding events in these early English colonies (p. 366).

Hornings detailed and well-researched book is organized into four lengthy chapters, each of which reads archaeological findings alongside the documentary record to disrupt common assumptions about colonialism. For example, in chapter 1 Horning convincingly argues that the English obsession with what they viewed as Irish misuse of land (largely as a result of alleged Irish practices of transhumance, or booleying) does not match the archaeological record: rather, there is considerable evidence for established, nucleated settlements throughout late medieval Ireland (p. 34). Chapter 2 uses archaeology to build on a more recent trend in scholarship that emphasizes the contingent nature of early colonial ventures in Roanoke and Albemarle. Homings careful explication of material sources allows her to stress the longevity of Native identities in the face of disruption, disease, and displacement in this region (p. 102). In the third chapter Homing uses archaeology to

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