Ebony and Ivy

Starred review from August 1, 2013
An eye-opening examination of how America's colonial-era colleges were rooted in slave economies and "stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage." Wilder (History/MIT; In the Company of Black Men: The African Influence on African American Culture in New York City, 2002, etc.) establishes the interrelationship between slave-cultivated plantations and the academic institutions that lived off the rents gathered through endowments, leases, mortgage debts and other instruments of feudal-style bondage. At first, land holdings were acquired through conquest of native populations, followed by successive phases of clearance and resettlement. "The Indians-for-African trade reduced the risk of enslaved Indians fleeing to their own lands or inciting conflicts," writes Wilder, "and brought a population of African slaves who lacked knowledge of the local geography and languages but possessed important agricultural skills, particularly in rice production." The slave trade developed in complexity as it grew in scale. Universities and colleges not only required their own endowments of land as sources of income and supplies, but also served to educate the leaders and administrators of the colonial settlements, who often became apologists for slavery. Wilder provides an excellent exploration of the role of the College of New Jersey and the Rev. John Witherspoon in the education of the leaders (James Madison and Patrick Henry, among many others) and their successors (John Marshall and James Monroe), who formulated the Indian Removal Act of 1830. His detailed elaboration of how Northern colleges spread the slave system into colonies like South Carolina and Georgia is equally thorough, and he also documents how race science took root in American academia. A groundbreaking history that will no doubt contribute to a reappraisal of some deep-rooted founding myths.

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April 15, 2013
A professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Wilder here reveals how deeply American institutions of higher education have been entwined with slavery, which even helped fund the building of some colleges.

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August 1, 2013

Wilder (American history, Massachusetts Inst. of Technology; A Covenant with Color: Race and Social Power in Brooklyn) probes the links between higher education in the United States and the Atlantic slave trade and slavery. He traces how the founding, financing, and growth of America's early colleges intertwined with economic and social forces that created regional slave-based economies. His prolog, eight chapters, and epilog show that more than merely prospering from the wealth that Atlantic slavery created, American colleges actively abetted slavery by forging pernicious pseudoscience theories of human difference and social doctrines of biological inferiority to propagate popular belief in divinely ordained white supremacy. America's colleges, Wilder argues, joined hand in hand with church and state to build a nation based on bondage and promote a political culture rooted in racism. VERDICT Extending the insights in Caribbean historian and statesman Eric Williams's 1944 classic Capitalism and Slavery, Wilder's copiously documented argument exposes how deeply implicated American higher education has been in racial exploitation that has dispossessed and subjugated peoples of color so as to invest whites beyond measure. His is a study deserving of serious attention from anyone interested in America's history, institutions, or intellectual development. [See Prepub Alert, 3/25/13.]--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.