Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 by Sean D. Moore (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 by Sean D. Moore Matthew Sangster Sean D. Moore, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 ( Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 288; 21 b/w illus. $91.00 cloth. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries argues convincingly that "the African slave was the property that created the sovereign, virtuous, agrarian white civic republican" (15). It achieves this by bringing to light forms of exploitation that both subsidized and informed eighteenth-century literary culture. The book constructs its argument by considering interconnected material and ideological spheres, examining the sources of wealth that allowed well-to-do subscription library members access to expensive cultural luxuries alongside analyzing literary works that were held in and circulated from such libraries. An extensive preface and introduction work in concert to set out the book's principal contentions and parameters. In the introduction, the careful discussions of historiography and the commitment to clarity of argument are particularly impressive. Each of the five chapters features "an introduction, an explication of its major literary text for analysis, a history of the library it explores, and evidence of reading books in the library's particular socio-cultural contexts" (xiii). The first chapter examines the Salem Social Library (founded in 1760) alongside Oroonoko, considering both Aphra Behn's original fiction (1688) and John Hawkesworth's 1759 play. The second chapter reads Alexander Pope's use of slavery metaphors and his defenses of the status quo in Windsor Forest (1713) and the Essay on Man (1733–4) in the context of the Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island (founded in 1747). The third chapter pairs Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and the [End Page 127] New York Society Library (founded in 1754), focusing particularly on possessive individualism. The fourth chapter considers Charles Johnstone's Chrysal; or, The Adventures of a Guinea (1760 and 1765), reading the politics of the it-narrative through the lenses of the Charleston Library Society (founded in 1748) and the South Carolina practice of using enslaved people to back paper money. The final chapter considers the Library Company of Philadelphia (founded in 1731) alongside Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789). This chapter pays particular attention to generic mixing and to the uses Equiano made of the work of Philadelphia-based abolitionist Anthony Benezet, whose books representing African civilizations in a positive light were compiled in part using Library Company holdings. Moore marshals an entirely persuasive case that all five libraries he examines—and by implication most other early American subscription libraries—were founded and supported by men whose prosperity was underpinned by profits derived from slavery. Drawing on newspapers, correspondence, wills, bureaucratic records, manifests, and other forms of archival documentation, the book surfaces a complex web connecting American cultural institutions, the trade in slaves, and the trade in goods dependent on slave labor. Moore proves that access to culture and prestige in eighteenth-century America was highly contingent on "slavery philanthropy" (203), the legacies of which he convincingly contends still inform the assumptions of what he calls the "charitable industrial complex" (204). Moore is clear that the readers he examines were not ideologically indistinguishable. Discussing Library Company borrowers, he argues that their taste "was clearly omnivorous and varied" (198). Nevertheless, he positions the reading of expensive books as necessarily imbricated in fostering exclusive forms of subjectivity. Winding up a discussion of popular texts in his introduction, he writes that their primary concern was "the creation of the possessive individualist reader. Books were consumer society, and they fundamentally taught people how to be good consumers, how to behave in an individualist society, and, most fundamentally, how to survive as an individual in modernity" (33). This is by no means a completely original proposition, and neither does Moore present it as such: one of the book's many virtues is its scrupulous and intelligent engagement with the work of other critics. However, Moore's research allows him to shed new and powerful light on numerous textual elements, such as the hypocritical use...