The slave societies of the American colonies were quite different from the "Old South" of the early-nineteenth-century United States. In this engaging study of a colonial older South; Robert Olwell analyzes the structures and internal dynamics of a world in which both masters and slaves were also imperial subjects. While slavery was peculiar within a democratic republic; it was an integral and seldom questioned part of the eighteenth-century British empire.Olwell examines the complex relations among masters; slaves; metropolitan institutions; officials; and ideas in the South Carolina low country from the end of the Stono Rebellion through the chaos of the American Revolution. He details the interstices of power and resistance in four key sites of the colonial social order: the criminal law and the slave court; conversion and communion in the established church; market relations and the marketplace; and patriarchy and the plantation great house. Olwell shows how South Carolina's status as a colony influenced the development of slavery and also how the presence of slavery altered English ideas and institutions within a colonial setting. Masters; Slaves; and Subjects is a pathbreaking examination of the workings of American slavery within the context of America's colonial history.
#3654199 in Books Cornell University Press 1997-04-17Original language:EnglishPDF # 1 8.85 x .69 x 5.73l; .86 #File Name: 080143338X224 pages
Review
20 of 26 people found the following review helpful. The Dual Nature of Islamic FundamentalismBy Daniel Pipes; Middle East Forum; PhiladelphiaJansen; a professor at Leiden University in Holland; is one of the most astute and daring writers on fundamentalist Islam. His title points to the rather pedestrian fact that fundamentalist Islam �is both fully politics and fully religion;� but the book offers the author�s deep understanding of this phenomenon; which he characterizes as an �unusual combination of logic; religion; politics and violence.�Jansen shows how fundamentalist Islam is �religion narrowed down to an ideology� but is still a religion; albeit one concerned with earthly power. He establishes that it is not a protest against being poor but an invariably successful form of propaganda �because the public to whom it is addressed love to hear it.� The two chapters on fundamentalist attitudes toward Jews and women are among the most incisive anywhere. But the most interesting chapter may be �the failure of the liberal alternative;� in which Jansen establishes that the anti-fundamentalists have �no weapons other than words� and so are steadily losing to the fundamentalists; who have large masses of followers.Jansen�s book is not so much a systematic study as a series of musings by a original and daring mind; primarily concentrating on Egypt. He reads the writers others only cite; such as Faraj Fuda and Shukri Mustafa. He chides not just fundamentalists; but also the ulema and fellow orientalists for absurdities and errors in logic. Islam; he says; obviously must be tolerated in an open society; �but does this tolerance extend to Islamic fundamentalism too?� Yes; he replies; if it is a legitimate form of Islam; but not if it is a political ideology.Middle East Quarterly; December 1997
