Michael Guasco explores the meaning of human bondage in the early modern Atlantic world in this smart, elegant, and engaging study. He forcefully reminds us that slavery had no legal basis in the Anglo-Atlantic world before the mid-seventeenth century, and the scholarly focus on the study of slavery has diverted our attention from the complexities of human bondage before that date. He reaches several important conclusions that compel us to rethink what we know about the origins of slavery in this crucial era. There are echoes of Winthrop Jordan's magisterial White Over Black here, but he goes further than Jordan in considering all forms of bondage among every group who fell victim to them – not only to Africans, but to Native Americans and Europeans who found themselves bound to another.

He begins with an examination of the understanding of bondage in early modern England. Slavery was in its death throes there, though other forms of bound labor like villeinage survived. New translations of the Bible and classical works into English exposed literate Englishmen to slavery as both a spiritual and historical condition. Contemporary historians recognized slavery as a part of the English past, but praised the free soil of England where slavery could no longer exist. Still, as the abuse of the system of villeinage and the enslavement of criminals showed, just how that freedom worked in practice was under negotiation.

When English travelers and adventurers ventured into the wider world, they confronted slavery and bondage at almost every turn. In southern Europe slavery thrived, and they claimed that the existence of slavery in Ireland justified English rule there. Englishmen might criticize bondage in their writings, but were quick to adopt it when they found themselves in places that allowed it. Africa was only one of many places where the English found slavery, but they saw it as a trade opportunity, and several expeditions carried enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies in the Americas in the 1560s. Despite these early slave voyages, the English in Africa in that period were more interested in other forms of trade and sympathetic in their portrayal of Africans.

As the bitter rivalry between England and Spain heated up, the English began to look for weak spots in Spain's American empire, and they often allied themselves with enslaved Africans there. Africans served as translators, guides, military allies, and cultural mediators. Some of those Africans even found their way to England itself and became a part of English society in various capacities, though perhaps Guasco makes too little of Elizabeth I's effort to round up and deport all Africans from the realm. Increasingly Englishmen encountered Africans as slaves, but also in a range of other important roles that complicated that picture.

If enslavement was the common fate of most Africans in the Atlantic world, the enslavement of Englishmen became increasingly common and appeared as a major theme in English accounts toward the end of the sixteenth century. As English traders sailed into the pirate-infested waters of the Mediterranean, tens of thousands of them were captured and enslaved. In fact, it was this slavery, rather than their knowledge of the enslavement of Africans, that provided them with the most reliable information about the institution, and these captivity narratives made for popular reading. Englishmen were captured, dehumanized, sold in markets, forced into the brutal galleys, raped, circumcised, and forced to convert to Islam.

As the English established their American colonies throughout the sixteenth century, slavery emerged first as a potential punishment for English men and women and Native Americans who failed to meet the expectations of colonial administrators. While indentured servitude existed in England, the colonial institution was far different and more closely resembled slavery. The enslavement of Native Americans occurred rarely and usually grew out of a need to maintain order rather than as a system of labor. They were considered more useful as trading partners and allies against the Spanish whose cruel treatment of them was often contrasted to the more enlightened English attitudes.

Guasco argues convincingly that too much attention and interpretive weight has been given to the arrival of the first Africans in Jamestown in 1619. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, Africans occupied many different spaces in the English colonies, and ‘African slavery in the English Atlantic was… ill-defined, unsupported by positive law, and often without an obvious economic rationale’ (p. 198). Englishmen enslaved some Africans, mostly acquiring them from the Spanish who had already determined their status. Africans trickled into Virginia but came in larger numbers to colonies like Barbados and Providence Island. Still, it is difficult to get any firm count of Africans or to determine their status with any certainty in these early years. The conversion of Africans and the arrival of mixed-race children further complicated matters. Clearly, the situation was confused ‘in a world where no one was really sure whose customs and legal traditions carried more weight – those of England or the Atlantic world’ (p. 219).

That confusion was put to rest after 1661 when the English colonial legislatures enacted laws recognizing slavery as the most common status for Africans. Race-based plantation slavery was born only in the late seventeenth century. What came before it was a more complicated, messy, and varied encounter with slavery and other forms of bound labor around the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds and beyond. It is understandable, then, that Jamaica's lawmakers in 1664 claimed that they had no ‘guide by where to walke’ (p. 233) regarding slavery. Fortunately, Guasco is a most expert guide to that lost world, and readers inside and outside the academy should take the journey with him.