Historians deliberately understated the scale of unfreedom in colonial America.
Evidence
- See A. E. Smith, op. cit., chapters 11 and 12; Hofstadter, op. cit., pp. 49–58. In her attempt to assess the extent to which the ruling class was exclusionist during the heady period of the revolutionary era, Linda Grant De Pauw noted an extraordinary conservatism among her academic predecessors who had studied the period: “The most extreme estimate of unfreedom in colonial America I have found is that of Howard Zinn who estimates that the proportion of the population in ‘physical or economic bondage’ was ‘about one-third of the total,’” Howard Zinn, The Politics of History, Beacon Press, Boston, 1970, p. 60. De Pauw, “Land of the Unfree: Legal Limitations on Liberty in Pre-revolutionary America,” Maryland Historical Magazine 68, no. 4 (Winter 1973): 356, n. 9. As the quote that follows in the text above indicates, De Pauw was much less sanguine. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1720
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the book’s earlier chapters on how historians have obscured the record of racial capitalism and Black resistance.