Margaret Newell Receives James A. Rawley Prize

Congratulations to Professor Margaret Newell. Her book, "Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery" has won the 2016 Organization of American Historians' James A. Rawley prize for the best book dealing with the history of race relations.

From Cornell University Press:

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians. Massachusetts became the first English colony to legalize slavery in 1641, and the colonists' desire for slaves shaped the major New England Indian wars, including the Pequot War of 1637, King Philip's War of 1675–76, and the northeastern Wabanaki conflicts of 1676–1749. When the wartime conquest of Indians ceased, New Englanders turned to the courts to get control of their labor, or imported Indians from Florida and the Carolinas, or simply claimed free Indians as slaves.

Drawing on letters, diaries, newspapers, and court records, Newell recovers the slaves’ own stories and shows how they influenced New England society in crucial ways. Indians lived in English homes, raised English children, and manned colonial armies, farms, and fleets, exposing their captors to Native religion, foods, and technology. Some achieved freedom and power in this new colonial culture, but others experienced violence, surveillance, and family separations.

Newell also explains how slavery linked the fate of Africans and Indians. The trade in Indian captives connected New England to Caribbean and Atlantic slave economies. Indians labored on sugar plantations in Jamaica, tended fields in the Azores, and rowed English naval galleys in Tangier. Indian slaves outnumbered Africans within New England before 1700, but the balance soon shifted. Fearful of the growing African population, local governments stripped Indian and African servants and slaves of legal rights and personal freedoms. Nevertheless, because Indians remained a significant part of the slave population, the New England colonies did not adopt all of the rigid racial laws typical of slave societies in Virginia and Barbados. Newell finds that second- and third-generation Indian slaves fought their enslavement and claimed citizenship in cases that had implications for all enslaved peoples in eighteenth-century America.

The following item appeared in Arts & Sciences College News

Margaret Ellen Newell, professor and vice chair, Department of History, has received the 2016 James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH). The award, presented annually for the best book dealing with the history of race relations in the U.S., was given to Newell for her book, Brethren By Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015).

“I’m honored to receive this award,” she said. “The book examines the significance of Indian slavery in colonial New England, where colonists enslaved thousands of Indians in the 1600s and 1700s. Indian slavery also shaped how African slavery developed in the colonies.”

Newell drew on letters, diaries, newspaper reports and court records for information. “I wanted to recover the slaves’ own stories and show how they influenced New England society. Many Indian slaves lived closely with the English families, raising their children, cooking their meals and manning colonial armies and farms. Of course, slavery had devastating effects on Indian communities. English colonists exported some New England Indians to the Caribbean and even to North Africa.”

In presenting the award, the OAH said, “The importance of this book rests in multiple areas: it reasserts the primacy of the indigenous in terms of the origins of slavery in London’s colonies; it demonstrates that the alleged barrier of source material is no impediment in teasing out this profound topic; and the pellucid writing conveys the magnitude of the subject in no uncertain terms.

The OAH is the world’s largest professional association dedicated to American history scholarship, with more than 7,500 members from the U.S. and abroad.