Brethren by Nature

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell reveals a little-known aspect of American history: English colonists in New England enslaved thousands of Indians.

Margaret Ellen Newell is Professor of History at The Ohio State University. She is the author of From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England, also from Cornell.

Newell's achievement represents some of the best new research within the historiographies of Native America, slavery, and colonial New England. Never losing sight of the enslaved themselves, Brethren by Nature places the travails of indigenous nations and individuals at the heart of colonial slavery. With this outstanding work, Newell shakes the 'city on the hill' to its very core.

Colin G. Calloway:

Newell recovers the stories of individual Indian people caught up in a system of unfree labor that contributed to New England's prosperity, linked the region to slave economies in the Atlantic and Caribbean, and played an important role in the racialization of society. Brethren by Nature is an important book about Indians in New England; it is also an important book about New England.

Daniel K. Richter:

Newell has done an excellent job of combing through court recordscorrespondenceand other materials to reconstruct details large and small and to uncover the stories of enslaved people and their enslavers... [A] testament to her careful scholarship and indeed a central part of the story of Indian slavery in New England.

Tanya H. Lee:

Last fall, National Geographic and PBS touted their respective TV series about the first Thanksgiving as new and historically accurate interpretations of the European colonization of New England. But neither 'Saints and Strangers' nor 'American Experience: The Pilgrims' dared to go where Margaret Ellen Newell has gone in her most recent book, Brethren by Nature, a meticulously researched account of American Indian slavery during the Colonial period in New England.

Peter Mancal, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, University of Southern California, author of Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America:

Margaret Ellen Newell's vibrant Brethren by Nature recovers an almost lost history of slavery and servitude in colonial New England. Through poignant stories and insights gleaned from legal records she proves that unfree labor was ubiquitous in early America.

Daniel Mandell, Truman State University, author of King Philip's War; Behind the Frontier; and Tribe, Race, History:

In Brethren by Nature, Margaret Ellen Newell aims to put Indian slavery into the forefront of the economic and legal history of colonial New England and show how it was an important aspect of the larger development of slavery in the western Atlantic world. Newell clearly and even brilliantly succeeds in that goal.

Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky, author of Disowning Slavery:

Brethren by Nature offers a well-researched and beautifully written examination of the evolution of Indian slavery in New England from its inception to its decline by 1800, its effects on English and indigenous societies, and its key role in the larger Atlantic world of commerce and labor exchange. This book makes an important contribution to scholarship on colonial, early national, Native American, and Atlantic World history as well as to studies of race and slavery.