Rorotoko

In a nutshell

In Dangerous Economies, I explain a shocking moment in eighteenth-century America. 250 years ago, New York was gripped by a terrible fear: that resident slaves were conspiring to torch the city, murder its white inhabitants, and hand over the smoldering burg to the Catholic king of Spain. Based on the testimony of one sixteen-year-old girl, New York’s Supreme Court burned thirteen enslaved men at the stake, hanged seventeen more, along with two white men and two white women, and banned nearly 100 people from the colony.

The force that drove this eighteenth-century witch-hunt was not so much racism as the newly unleashed power of capitalism. By looking at economic growth as a cultural phenomenon, and not just a fiscal one, I explain how the colony’s courts could come to believe this fantastic story.

250 years ago New York was enjoying an economic boom as impressive as the one of the 1990s—complete with confidence artists and unrestrained consumption—and everyone tried to exploit a corner of the market. The result was the creation of a scandalously dangerous economy: one with multiple opportunities, great risks, and sometimes devastating consequences.

The wide angle

Other historians, especially in the last ten years, have written about this suspected conspiracy. Indeed, as an undergraduate student, I myself abridged the one extant judge’s account of the trials. But no one had yet explained how such an enormous cause célèbre could just melt away with no discernable aftermath. When the trials ended, the colony did not enact a tough new slave code (unlike the South Carolina legislature, which passed new laws after the 1739 Stono uprising). The only piece of new legislation with an explicit connection to the suspected conspiracy was the establishment of a military watch. Six months later the assembly admitted that it could not find enough inhabitants to staff the shifts, and it did not bother to renew the law. How could such a ghastly incident fade so quickly from view?

As I dug into the background of this story, I wondered if the answer lay not in the trials themselves but in their setting. So before I could explain how this conspiracy came to seem feasible, I had to come to a better understanding of eighteenth-century New York City. As I came to know the city, I realized that its three most important characteristics were intertwined.

First, this was an imperial city. New Yorkers, free and enslaved, were proud members of the British empire. Before 1765, British provincials, far from desiring colonial independence, clung to their powerful empire in the face of nearly constant threats from the rival French, Spanish, and Native American empires that surrounded them. Indeed, even in their most mundane interactions, New Yorkers were essential components of the expanding British empire.

Second, this was a slave city. Its population was roughly eighteen percent enslaved—the highest proportion of slaves north of Maryland.

Finally, New York’s economy was based on trade—not on production, not on self-sufficiency. New York was a commercial place with an economy that expanded hand in hand with the increasing power of the British empire.

Reading letters, newspapers, business ledgers, and court records, I realized that the inhabitants of the city looked outwards, towards the Atlantic. These days, we pay little attention to New York’s wharves and ports, and they’re easy to overlook. But in fact, it was precisely the port culture of New York that tied together empire, slavery, and trade. I started to pay attention to fluidity—of people, and of ideas. And then I started thinking about whether a rising tide really did lift all boats.

For most of the eighteenth century, New York really was on a rising tide of an economic boom, in the middle of an enormous economic and imperial expansion. And I certainly found all sorts of people trying to make the most of this newly accessible market: people with very little disposable income, including poor women and slaves, people who would do anything for the most obscure markers of social distinction. It was this world, of uncertain status distinctions, underpinned by the easy flow of credit, money, and people, that allowed fears of an international papist slave uprising to flourish.

It was this world, of uncertain status distinctions, underpinned by the easy flow of credit, money, and people, that allowed fears of an international papist slave uprising to flourish.