Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade

FAIN: FB-58165-15

Sean Doyle Moore
University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH 03824-2620)

Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce--the book trade and the slave trade. This NEH Fellowship project bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. In doing so, it merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labor of the African diaspora. The monograph emerging from this research, accordingly, is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge.

Associated Products

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814 (Book)
Title: Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731-1814
Author: Sean D. Moore
Abstract: Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce--the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, this book merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora. This volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, the book claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.
Year: 2019
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/title/slavery-and-the-making-of-early-american-libraries-british-literature-political-thought-and-the-transatlantic-book-trade-1731-1814/oclc/1055262631&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198836377
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

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