Slaves as Securitized Assets

Abstract

Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, is an “it-narrative” about the transatlantic circulation of a coin, so it is only appropriate that it appealed to readers in colonial America due to their transactions in people, currency, and objects. By studying how this book circulated in Charleston, South Carolina—the port made most wealthy by slave trading—and in the other colonies, this chapter asks questions about the separation of objects and objectified people like slaves in the period, exploring how the colonial reception of “it-narratives” helped produce a distinction between them for anti-slavery purposes. By centering its analysis on the social network of enslavers constitutive of the Charleston Library Society, the consumption of novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela by Eliza Lucas Pinckney and others can now be seen as slavery-enabled reading. It shows an extreme example of investment of slavery money into tasteful imports like books.