Book Review: American race relations and the legacy of British colonialism

Stanton’s (2020) book, American Race Relations and the Legacy of British Colonialism, presents a review of the history of British colonialism and its impacts on the social division of race in the United States. The body of the book is broken into three sections: Colonial Economies, Societies, and Laws; The Rule of Law and Its Significance; and Law, Slavery, and America’s Divided Society. These sections explore the influence of British colonization on race relations in the historical and contemporary United States and interrogate slavery and the exploitation of labor as a means to facilitate White dominance and control over Black populations. The book establishes that contemporary race relations in the United States can be traced back to the legacy of British colonialism as it shaped the economic and legal systems designed to maintain social and economic divisions between the dominant White and assumingly “subordinate” Black populations. Although the book recognizes that much work remains to be done, it outlines some of the changes in contemporary legal systems that support efforts to close the divides based on systemic racism.

Stanton situates the book within the social, economic, and legal systems of British colonization in order to interrogate the role of the British Empire in shaping race relations, emphasizing the direct links between the slave trade in North America and Great Britain’s governmental, mercantile, and industrial interests. The book offers a critical discussion of the legal and constitutional processes that continue to fuel racial tensions and examines the role of British colonialism in constructing America’s pluralist society, highlighting it as a sign of social divisions that promote white supremacy and the assumed Black “inferiority.” Further, Stanton includes an important distinction between the rule of law and the rule by law to interrogate access to the legal system that facilitates its control of “subordinate” groups. This distinction offers a concrete understanding of the ways states have used laws selectively to assert their authority and control over Black people, while White populations enjoyed a system built on and promoted by the rule of the law discourses. In general, this book contributes to the existing scholarship on the history of British colonialist and capitalist legal systems and their influence on American pluralism. However, the text lacks a nuanced discussion of settler colonialism in its historical and contemporary manifestations.

Although the book accounts for the role of British colonialism, economic capitalism, and the law in shaping race relations, emphasis on the centrality of these systems oversimplifies the complexities related to the assumed superiority of whiteness and neglects to examine how whiteness uses law and economic systems to facilitate its dominance and control. Furthermore, Stanton claims to explore the history of race relations in the United States. However, the discussion focuses mainly on race relations between White and Black people, thereby missing or minimizing attention to the racialized experiences and life chances of Indigenous peoples and other racialized groups. Indeed, although Stanton acknowledges they intentionally omitted Indigenous peoples and their experiences from the discussion, this omission centered the analysis of race relations within a White and Black dichotomy. The book could have greatly benefited from a critical gendered analysis of the history of colonization and slavery, particularly regarding its effects on women and different forms of intersectional identities. The text also could have included a discussion of resistance, antiracism, and antiblack racism in order to engage explicitly with contemporary forms of resistance to colonial legacies. Doing so would have centered on the agency and experiences of those resisting colonialism and racism instead of focusing analysis primarily on the representation of dominant colonial narratives. Overall, the book offers a comprehensive understanding of the history of race relations between Black and White people in the United States and provides valuable insights that could help social workers understand the use of economy and law as mechanisms to maintain white dominance and control. The book could also serve as an example to help understand British influence on the socioeconomic and legal systems of other former British colonies to interrogate their impacts on race relations and dynamics. This book serves as a call for much more needed work to be done to reconcile the history of oppression and racism caused by British colonialism, whose effects we continue to witness today on Indigenous, Black, and other racialized groups in America and beyond.