New England Bound

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to enslavement.

Author Wendy Anne Warren is an American historian and assistant professor at Princeton University. Her specializations include “colonial and revolutionary North America, the Atlantic world, comparative slavery, carceral studies, and gender and sexuality studies” (“Wendy Warren.” Princeton University). Warren completed her PhD in history at Yale University in 2008; her thesis was entitled Enslaved Africans in New England, 1638-1700. While completing this research, Warren had what she described as a “fluke encounter” with Englishman John Josselyn’s travelogue from 1638, in which he discusses his trip to New England where he stayed with colonist Samuel Maverick (“Forgotten History: How the New England Colonists Embraced the Slave Trade.” Fresh Air hosted by Terry Gross. NPR, 21 June 2016). In it he describes how an enslaved woman came to him to complain of her rape by another enslaved person, which had been urged by their enslaver, Maverick, who was attempting to breed them. Warren was intrigued by this disturbing early instance of chattel slavery in the fledgling colony of Boston. Warren had not strongly associated slavery with early New England, as it did not have a cash crop, and decided to research the topic further.

New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America is the product of her investigation, and Warren’s training as a historian is evident in her detailed analysis, which she supports with her many references to primary sources. She refers to diary entries, travelogues, letters, trade records, wills, probates, contracts, and pamphlets to create detailed narratives. Nearly all of Warren's primary sources were written by English colonists, and Warren is able to easily piece together the life stories and perspectives of prominent colonists such as Samuel Sewall, John Winthrop, and Cotton Mather. Understanding the perspectives of enslaved Africans and Indigenous people, however, is a much harder task, since they generally did not have the privilege of contributing firsthand to the written records of the time. As such, Warren examines colonists’ sources for important mentions of enslaved people and presents information about what they reveal about enslaved people’s lives and experiences, both as individuals and as examples of chattel slavery in general. These inferences help her to present an accurate understanding of slavery in this region and time period and provides a glimpse into different individuals’ experiences in spite of the lack of source material written by enslaved people. Published in 2017 by American publisher Boni and Liveright, this work has been lauded in scholarly circles and won the 2017 Merle Curti Social History Prize. It was also a finalist for three major literary prizes: the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the 2017 Harriet Tubman Prize, and the 2017 Berkshire Conference Book Prize. Professor Warren was named a Frederick Burkhardt fellow in 2019 and is now researching prisons in early America.