Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807 by Michael Lawrence Dickinson (review)

Abstract

The concept of social death, developed by sociologist Orlando Patterson in his now-classic book Slavery and Social Death, continues to loom large in debates about early modern Atlantic slavery.1 Numerous scholars have engaged with Patterson’s work to make sense of enslavement and its impact on the enslaved individual.2 This literature has left us with a very clear picture of the exploitation, brutalization, denial of rights, and indeed denial of personhood that enslaved Africans and their descendants endured. Their treatment and the place they were forced to occupy in the slavery-based economic system that shaped our modern age produced such alienation from society that, even if they did not succumb to physical death, they became, as Patterson explains, socially dead. Patterson’s work has also offered a generative conceptual starting point for these scholars to explore the ways in which enslaved people, individually and collectively, survived and pushed back against the violent realities of enslavement. In Almost Dead, Michael Lawrence Dickinson contributes to that effort. He does so by exploring the analytic potential of the idea of social rebirth articulated by, among others, Stephanie E. Smallwood in her book Saltwater Slavery.3 Smallwood uses the term to encapsulate the social and cultural dynamics Africans engaged in to survive the dehumanization and alienation they suffered during the Atlantic slave trade. Dickinson applies social rebirth to a discussion of Black survival in urban Anglo-America—specifically Bridgetown, Kingston, and Philadelphia— from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Throughout the book’s five chapters, Dickinson demonstrates that, if slavery inflicted a