Frank Proctor's book begins dramatically: ‘On May 26, 1728, a large group of slaves armed with knives and machetes surrounded a colonial official on the road and threatened to burn the ingenio where they lived to the ground’ (p. 1). A few weeks later, about 50 slaves fled the Mexican sugar plantation where they lived and worked. By the end of the paragraph we learn that this enraged group of enslaved humans was not intent on inciting general riot or escaping to found a maroon community. Instead, the people made their way to Mexico City to lodge a formal legal complaint about conditions on their plantation. In Proctor's introduction, he offers an enticing invitation (his word) ‘to explore slavery from the perspective of slaves themselves, to reveal how the enslaved understood their own actions in the specific geographical and chronological context of New Spain in the middle colonial period’ (p. 1). He argues that although the master class certainly ‘feared that a desire for liberty drove slave rebelliousness’, and we in recent times have desired rather than feared to believe it was so, the evidence indicates that ‘much more mundane issues led to … slave rebelliousness’ (p. 2). He asserts that it may be more useful to treat the ‘private transcripts’ (in the James Scottian sense) of the enslaved ‘as a representation of their desire to expand their control over labor, family, cultural beliefs, and even access to manumission and as aimed at working the system to their “least disadvantage” ’ (p. 8). Proctor posits that his study will be theoretically relevant, bringing to bear the work not only of James Scott but also of such wide-ranging figures as Jackson Lears and Michel Foucault (pp. 5–7). He acknowledges that Mexico in the mid-colonial period was an unusual place, in that there were more ex-slaves than slaves, unlike almost anywhere else (p. 3), but he assumes that the issue at stake is of such overarching importance that the demographics will change only the specifics in different situations, and will not alter certain larger truths.

Proctor's chapters follow the availability of sources. Chapter 1 provides a statistical demographic overview. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the culture of the enslaved through data on marriage and the practice of magic. Inquisition records on blasphemy and witchcraft provide material for chapter 4, which explores the question of rebelliousness directly. Chapter 5 analyses records on runaways and actual rebellions, and chapter 6 considers suits for liberty brought by the enslaved.

The thoughtful introduction and the decision to allow extant sources rather than modern concepts to shape the contours of the chapters are both admirable, even inspiring. However, the book also serves as a sharp reminder of why certain kinds of conservatives were concerned about the cultural turn and the decentring of our narratives in the first place. They were not all reactionaries in an intellectual sense. Some worried that the analysis of ‘hidden transcripts’ would prove difficult at best, and would certainly be botched in the hands of the inept. Reading hidden transcripts requires a degree of sensitivity to nuance and an awareness of multiplicity of experience that not all social scientists – and not even all humanists – possess. Chapter 4, ‘“I Renounce the Virgin Mary”: Mastery, Violence, and Power’, seems to provide a case in point. Proctor argues that the slaves’ blasphemy was not usually ‘aimed at a redistribution of power’ and that ‘the tendency to treat any act, like a blasphemous outburst, that forced slave-holders to recognize the humanity of their bondspeople as a form of resistance oversimplifies master power and slave reactions to it’ (p. 97). He says that ‘in most cases the slave's intent was not to draw attention to excesses’ (p. 99), and that ‘none of the bondspeople appear to have viewed the beatings they received or witnessed as illegitimate’ (p. 101). When one slave in the record blasphemes under his breath, Proctor says that ‘while some might be tempted to treat Pascual's blasphemy as a resistive act, the fact that he did so under his breath suggests it was not’ and also ‘that another bondsman felt compelled to report that blasphemy, even in an instance that appeared to border on abuse, is also quite suggestive of the power dynamics that animated slavery’ (p. 102). It seems to me, and I believe will seem to many readers, that very different interpretations of these bits of evidence are in order. If slaves never asserted that violent punishment of the enslaved was against a Christian ethic, it may well demonstrate their knowledge of Spanish law more than their deepest thoughts. If they did not blaspheme in order to call the state's attention to a political wrong so much as to call God's attention to it, it does not mean they accepted the situation as natural. If Pascual spoke under his breath, he undoubtedly revealed the same kind of intentional resistance as every angry subordinate has revealed in that very way for centuries. If a peer of his felt compelled to report the blasphemy, perhaps it was in order to get Pascual out of the hands of their owner, or because he truly feared the master's cruelty was driving this man towards hell itself.

No, we can hardly take the evidence as proof that the enslaved had limited conceptions of a right to liberty. It does not prove that they did believe in a right to liberty, but it certainly doesn't prove that they did not. However, the author is to be praised for his lofty goals and for his research. He is not the first to jump too quickly to conclusions about transcribed moments from the past that require extraordinary sensitivity to understand.