Race Traffic

“Peck has published an important study that covers a wide range of subjects and literatures. . . . Race Traffic could work in classrooms at an advanced level. In those classes, students are likely to ask . . . who has it worse in any given period: servants, convicts, or enslaved people? This book can help answer that question in new ways by explaining the political work that [these] comparisons have accomplished, focusing on a broad geography where human trafficking and race become mutually constitutive.”—William & Mary Quarterly

“Peck draws innovatively from novels, travelogues, petitions, and poetry and also creatively uses digital tools to trace usage. . . . Recommended.”—CHOICE

“[An] intricate argument on the historical and geographical diversity of ‘race traffic.’ . . . [Peck] corrects the view that ideas of white supremacy became mainstream with the expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the 1680s.”—American Historical Review

“Race Traffic renews the histories of labor, antislavery, and race by demonstrating precisely how their subjects created one another. Crossing the Mediterranean and Atlantic, traversing the period from the rise of Britain’s global empire through the Age of Revolutions, this gripping study of words and deeds is both erudite and revelatory. It should be a game changer across more fields of inquiry than I can name.” —David Waldstreicher, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

“Locating the intertwined genealogies of human trafficking, antislavery, and the construction of whiteness in the British Empire and the early American Republic, Peck has given us an interpretively ambitious work with profound implications for the long afterlives of slavery and racism today. A compelling book that I cannot recommend enough.”—Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut

“This marvelous rethinking of race and coerced labor in the making of the modern world establishes a strong case for the global origins of white supremacy even as it fleshes out key sites and moments expertly. At once an achievement in the history of slavery, of resistance from below, of ruling ideas, and even of literature, Race Traffic will be read and debated for many years.” —David Roediger, University of Kansas