Journal of Southern History

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...