Making a Slave State
Political Development in Early South Carolina
Ryan A. Quintana
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 03/2018
Pages: 254
Subject: Social Science, History
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9781469642222
eBook ISBN: 9781469641072
DESCRIPTION
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 extralegal 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.
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