Fictions of Consent: Slavery, Servitude, and Free Service in Early Modern England. By Urvashi Chakravarty

In Fictions of Consent, Urvashi Chakravarty examines the narratives early modern English people told about service in order to contribute a better understanding of one of the enduring legal and political fictions of modernity: the fiction that people in politically, socially, and economically precarious positions consent to serve those in more stable positions. Early modern, for Chakravarty, means approximately 1500 to 1700, whereas England encompasses the court of Henry VIII but also colonies such as Massachusetts. The paradox of this society, so Chakravarty explains by way of introduction, is that it was ideologically opposed to slavery and yet ideologically committed to a hierarchy in which everybody was compelled to serve their earthly superiors. Thus, the judicial system routinely emancipated slaves Englishmen had acquired abroad, but the 1547 Vagrancy Act allowed virtually any property owner to impress virtually any masterless man into service. Such paradoxes, so Chakravarty posits, required an elaborate set of legal, political, and ideological fictions allowing people to construe other people’s service as consensual. Chakravarty’s archive for reconstructing these fictions includes stage plays, non-dramatic verse, captivity narratives, crime pamphlets, legal records, personal letters, and grammar-school curricula. Whereas the book’s archival scope is thus extensive, Chakravarty is by training a scholar of early modern English literature and accordingly devotes the most space to analysing the ideologies constructed and promulgated by canonical literary texts from roughly William Shakespeare to John Milton.

The book’s five main chapters examine different versions of the belief that servants have consented to serve. Chapter one discovers a wide-spread early modern assumption that wearing the uniform or ‘livery’ of a noble household empowered servants. Beginning with a discussion of how Shakespeare and his fellow actors in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were technically servants of a noble household, the chapter analyses how The Merchant of Venice echoes this dynamic in the character of Lancelot, a servant who naively hopes to improve his status by wearing the livery of the nobleman Bassanio. Chapter two examines how the Roman playwright Terence – a staple of early modern grammar school education – represented characters of foreign, often African, origin as naturally suited to servitude. Chapter three traces the social construct of the blood-related family as depicted in popular drama and considers the liminal place to which this ideology consigned household servants. Chapter four shows that Milton’s theological epic Paradise Lost mirrors the fictions of consent binding apprentices to their masters when it depicts Adam and Eve in a position of perpetual servitude. Chapter five examines Terrence, Shakespeare, and a Massachusetts court case in order to show that all three imagined freed slaves to owe a perpetual debt of gratitude to their former masters and that manumission was thus ultimately a tenuous concept. A theme pervading especially chapters two to five is that servitude came to be imagined as a heritable category, and Chakravarty plausibly suggests that this also racialized it.

Although the connections are sometimes subtle, one way of thinking about Fictions of Consent is as an attempt to trace the genealogy of Anglo-American racism. In Chakravarty’s telling, this genealogy begins with masterless Englishmen being impressed into service, then gets combined with ideas about the family, procreation, and heritability, and is eventually brought to the Americas, where it culminates in chattel slavery. This trajectory becomes clearer in an epilogue that puts the distinctly early modern English fictions of consent traced in the five main chapters into a larger historical perspective by identifying several instances in which they are echoed in nineteenth-century American discourses justifying slavery. Chakravarty concludes that this development follows inevitably from a heritable conception of servitude and that these ideologies could ultimately ‘only be inscribed on the bodies of black persons’ (198, emphasis original). Such absolute statements are often debatable, but one need not be persuaded by every detail of Chakravarty’s argument to learn from her analysis of the conditions that allowed a large number of early modern Englishmen to believe that others had consented to serve them, or indeed to draw both thematic and historical connections to contemporary ideologies encouraging people to believe that their fellow citizens have consented to work, rent, bank, or be policed under conditions that leave them precarious. As such, Fictions of Consent offers a compelling, incisive, and timely critique of a set of early modern ideologies that continue to shape the world.