Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England by Urvashi Chakravarty Sarah Bischoff Urvashi Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), ix + 295 pp. Fictions of Consent examines the contradiction between early modern England’s reliance on compulsory service and the claims that English air was “too pure for slaves to breath [sic] in” (John Lilburne’s Star Chamber Case of 1638, cited in Chakravarty, Fictions of Consent, 1). Urvashi Chakravarty highlights that this is [End Page 215] a matter of belief—not just of legislation. This belief made slavery in England (supposedly) an impossibility, despite the immense amount of historical and literary material that attests to compulsory labor and service on the island during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chakravarty examines this fissure, showing that the philosophical, legal difference between bound service and slavery is, per the title, supposed consent. Chakravarty thus argues that the primary operative fiction is that all persons on English soil willingly serve their betters all the way up to the monarch, who in turn willingly serves god. Such a structure legitimized the paradigm of the supposed impossibility of slavery on English soil—which legally and philosophically rendered enslaved people invisible—but still managed to enforce servitude through many avenues. One example she cites is the often brutal vagrancy and begging laws of the sixteenth century that punished and put to work the “masterless,” or those living outside socially acceptable systems of labor (often the houseless and/or beggars) (4). This coercion, however, is coincidental to the fiction and the mythos of English freedom, even as it is the fundamental contradiction that makes up the very matter of willing servitude. The ideological dependence upon this hairsplitting is that the idea of consent honed the fictions that underwrote and authorized compulsory servitude, even as it made slavery ostensibly impossible. This consent is a fiction in multiple senses of the word, Chakravarty argues: it is, as mentioned, an imagined reality that makes up the legal structures that forbid slavery on English soil, despite there being documented presences and an evident economic reliance on enslaved people; it is a rhetoric that turns compulsory labor into willing devotion and service; it becomes integral to the emergences of what will define the family, genealogy, and race. Of particular importance, also, is that these fictions reshape social reality as time continues, even as their artificiality stands out. These fictions can (and do) defend both the naturalization of racialized slavery and the naturalization of somatically marked race itself. These traced emergences make Chakravarty’s text a useful one for following questions of service and slavery across multiple centuries, from England to early America. These fictions will underwrite centuries of transatlantic exchange, eventually even progressing to ideologically defend the slavery that “consent” closed off. By grouping the book into three major theoretical sections—that of the servus (the slave/servant), the famulus (a servant of the household), and the libertus (the freed)—Chakravarty traces the fictions of consent through pedagogical, familial, and legal contracts that tie people to their employment (and their paternalistic mentors). Consent is not merely a mode of service; it’s an affective mode, allowing both work performance and work attitude to be policed. This multiplicity of definitional meanings is why Chakravarty describes these fictions of consent as “polyvalent and palimpsestic” (7), writing and rewriting new meanings across materials. This fact gives Chakravarty the space and ability to write about many different objects from the perspective of consent and labor—from clothes to poetry to legal contract. The first section—servus—consists of chapters 1 and 2, and are perhaps the most fascinating and complicated of the book. The first examines livery as a multifaceted symbol of both a nostalgia for feudal England as well as a [End Page 216] foreshadowing of somatic race-making, in which legible marks on the body become racializing shorthand. Though livery could enable its wearer—by showing an affiliation to a respectable house and legitimizing movement through restricted spaces—it also operated as a stigmatizing, bodily mark of servility, even if it is one that could...