Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina

How is the state produced? In what ways did enslaved African Americans shape modern governing practices? Ryan A. Quintana provocatively answers these questions by focusing on the everyday production of South Carolina's state space—its roads and canals, borders and boundaries, public buildings and military fortifications. Beginning in the early eighteenth century and moving through the post–War of 1812 internal improvements boom, Quintana highlights the surprising ways enslaved men and women sat at the center of South Carolina's earliest political development, materially producing the state's infrastructure and early governing practices, while also challenging and reshaping both through their day-to-day movements, from the mundane to the rebellious. Focusing on slaves' lives and labors, Quintana illuminates how black South Carolinians not only created the early state, but also established their own extra-legal economic sites, social and cultural havens, and independent communities along South Carolina's roads, rivers, and canals. Combining social history, the study of American politics, and critical geography, Quintana reframes our ideas of early American political development, illuminates the material production of space, and reveals the central role of slaves' daily movements (for their owners and themselves) to the development of the modern state.

About the Author :
Ryan A. Quintana is associate professor of history at Wellesley College.

Review :
"An important contribution to an ongoing scholarly and public discussion of the attribution of responsibility for the creation of the American state and public spaces. . . . Recommended to anyone interested in the more nuanced stories of enslaved peoples in the American South as well as students of American democracy."--Reviews in American History "An outstanding book which challenges mainstream conventions about the roles of slaves in state building, in this case South Carolina, from its inception as a colony to its development as a slave state. . . . A must read."--Civil War Book Review "Insightful and well-researched. . . . This is a good book, well worth reading, assigning, and discussing."--Journal of the Early Republic "Quintana (Wellesley College) reorients scholars' understanding of state formation by locating the labors and lives of slaves as fundamental to the state's creation. It was enslaved Carolinians who created the roads and especially the canals that bound the residents of South Carolina to the emerging state government."--CHOICE "Ryan Quintana has made an original and welcome contribution to two very active fields, one the history of slavery and capitalism, the other the history of the state in early America. . . . Quintana brings a genuinely fresh perspective, one that allows him to relate slavery to state formation in a new way."--American Nineteenth Century History "Slavery and enslaved people rightfully sit at the heart of this story."--Journal of Southern History "Supported by meticulous research from plantation records, state petitions, legislative and state agency records, political commentaries, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, maps, and property surveys, Quintana critically examines the relationship between slavery and the rise of the liberal state through the lens of spatial and social dynamics in early South Carolina."--North Carolina Historical Review "This is not just a history of space or of South Carolina. It is also a history of resistance. As such, it is also part of another new historiography, well suited to teach our present and to bring messages to what is our foreseeable future."--Journal of American History "Will be valuable reading for scholars of southern history, slavery, race, and criminal justice, as well as American political development." -- William and Mary Quarterly