Reviewed by:

• The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America by Jason T. Sharples
• Timothy David Fritz

According to slavery apologist Bryan Edwards, fear was the only impulse to which an enslaved person responded. Enslavers, however, "feared that the violence and terror with which they attempted to control enslaved people also sowed the seeds of their own destruction" (p. 9). Conceptions of fear, both real and imagined, were crucial in the operation of slave regimes. Jason T. Sharples offers an enticingly nuanced study of how "violence's less-visible counterpart, fear, influences a person's perception of the realm of possibility" in The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America (p. 19). Instead of viewing African attempts at escaping slavery as journeys toward autonomy, fearful enslavers comforted themselves by identifying conspiracies and rebellions as the same. Colonial officials assumed plots and actual insurrections as merely different stages of collective quests for African vengeance against their captors, a mistake repeated by some historians through the mid-twentieth century.

Often intangible but nevertheless historically impactful, fear shaped actions and government relations, forming the identity of enslavers and their understanding of enslaved people's capacity and motivation. On an interpersonal level, "a person with some awareness of others' fear could use it to exercise power to attempt to oppress them, to subvert them, or to survive" (p. 19). By bringing the power of this collective emotion to light, Sharples breathes new life into many well-known events, such as the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina and the many supposed plots in Barbados and elsewhere. What is remarkable about this work are the connections to external events that spurred enslavers to pay particular attention to the possibility of slave conspiracies to destroy white society. Increased enslaved populations, inter-imperial war, and Catholic threats to Protestant hegemony were all changes resulting in suspicion of African plots with striking similarity across the British Atlantic world.

Sharples situates his analysis within the broader contours of Atlantic history, drawing on judicial proceedings in the British Caribbean and British North America before and after their administrative separation in 1776 and at the local and state levels. These distinctions are possible due to the meticulous and compelling research in court records and trial verdicts and their impact on white colonists' public imagination from the late sixteenth century through the Haitian Revolution. Over six engaging chapters, Sharples traces how white colonists operationalized fear in the judicial process of investigating [End Page 333] insurrections and how Africans responded within their understandings of the same events.

The third chapter, in particular, captures the various enslaved responses to judicial torture in Antigua and New York in 1736 and 1741, respectively. Those suspected of small crimes could play on enslavers' fear by becoming informants for more severe crimes. Those incarcerated for possible plots could collude with other prisoners, cast the blame on enemies outside of jail, or accuse other inmates of being involved. Colonial officials were more concerned with gathering information they could act on than with that information's accuracy. The enslaver class constantly sought affirmation of their suspicions, made easier because the judges conducting the trials also coordinated witness testimony. In this quest to confirm white fears, some judges broke accepted legal precedents by allowing testimony from enslaved people, who would otherwise have been unable to testify in court. Because investigations and trials aimed at uncovering insurrections had to balance the law, enslavers' property rights, and "the court's self-assigned prerogative to terrorize the enslaved population," large numbers of convictions, which never resulted in hard evidence of conspiracy, eventually became economically unsustainable for human property owners (p. 120).

Overall, this study convincingly explores two essential questions for scholars of Atlantic history. First, how did slavery create such pervasive and long-standing fear among enslavers; and second, how were societies structured accordingly? In doing so, Sharples reveals "the intersections of diasporic African and colonial English ideas...

审核人：

• 恐惧造成的世界：美国早期的奴隶起义和阴谋恐慌（Jason T. Sharples）
• 蒂莫西·大卫·弗里茨（Timothy David Fritz）

根据奴隶制辩护者布莱恩·爱德华兹（Bryan Edwards）的说法，恐惧是被奴役者做出反应的唯一冲动。然而，奴役者“担心他们试图控制奴役者的暴力和恐怖行为也播下了自己毁灭的种子”（第9页）。在奴隶政权的运作中，恐惧和恐惧的观念都是真实的和想象的。杰森·夏普尔斯（Jason T. Sharples）对《恐惧造成的世界：奴隶起义和阴谋恐慌》中的“暴力的鲜为人知的恐惧，恐惧如何影响一个人对可能性领域的感知”进行了诱人的细致研究。（第19页）。恐惧的奴役者没有将非洲企图逃避奴隶制的尝试视为走向自治的旅程，而是通过将阴谋和叛乱视为相同来安慰自己。殖民地官员将情节和实际叛乱视为仅仅是非洲人对其俘虏进行复仇的集体追求的不同阶段，这是一些历史学家在20世纪中叶所反复犯的错误。

恐惧通常是无形的，但在历史上却具有影响力，恐惧塑造了行动和政府关系，形成了奴役者的身份以及他们对奴役人民的能力和动机的理解。在人际关系层面上，“一个对他人的恐惧有所了解的人可以利用它来行使权力，企图压迫他们，颠覆他们或生存”（第19页）。通过揭示这种集体情感的力量，沙普尔斯为许多著名的事件注入了新的活力，例如南卡罗来纳州的斯托诺叛乱以及巴巴多斯和其他地方的许多阴谋阴谋。这项工作的显着之处是与外部事件的联系，促使奴役者特别注意奴隶阴谋摧毁白人社会的可能性。被奴役的人口增加，帝国之间的战争，

夏普尔斯将他的分析放在大西洋历史的更广阔的轮廓中，借鉴了1776年行政分居前后在英属加勒比和英属北美进行的司法诉讼以及在地方和州一级的司法诉讼。由于对法庭记录和审判判决进行了细致而有说服力的研究，并且从十六世纪后期到海地革命，这对白人殖民者的公众想象力产生了影响，因此可以实现这些区别。在超过六章的引人入胜的章节中，Sharples追踪了白人殖民者如何在调查[End Page 333]叛乱的司法程序中如何化解恐惧，以及非洲人如何在理解相同事件的情况下作出回应。

第三章特别介绍了分别于1736年和1741年在安提瓜和纽约对司法酷刑采取的各种奴役应对措施。那些涉嫌小规模犯罪的人可以通过成为更严重犯罪的告密者，来担负奴役者的恐惧。被监禁可能阴谋的人可能会与其他囚犯串通，将罪魁祸首投给监狱外的敌人，或指责其他囚犯卷入其中。殖民地官员更关心的是收集可以采取行动的信息，而不是信息的准确性。奴隶制阶层不断寻求对自己怀疑的肯定，因为进行审判的法官还协调了证人的证词，因此使他们的怀疑更加容易。为了确认白人的恐惧，一些法官允许被奴役的人作证，从而打破了公认的法律判例，否则他们将无法在法庭上作证。由于旨在发动叛乱的调查和审判必须平衡法律，奴役者的财产权和“法院自给自足的特权，以对被奴役者进行恐吓”，大量的定罪从没有产生确凿的阴谋证据，最终成为了事实。对人类财产所有人来说，在经济上是不可持续的（第120页）。

总的来说，这项研究令人信服地探讨了大西洋历史学者的两个基本问题。首先，奴隶制如何在奴隶制中造成如此普遍和长期的恐惧；其次，社会是如何构成的？这样做，夏普莱斯揭示了“流散非洲和殖民地英国思想的交集……