The Human Toll is a disturbing volume. Anthony C. Infanti thereby achieves a key objective: to demonstrate “how taxation was embedded in slavery” (p. 3). Grounding his scholarship firmly in critical legal studies, Infanti challenges the dominant legal academic discourse by revealing in painful detail how tax law and taxation were woven into the social fabric of colonial society, part and parcel of everyday life. The tax system’s racism was not exceptional, but strongly aligned with other systems of colonial oppression.

For some, the taxation focus might not appear compelling, of concern only to legal scholars. On the contrary, it challenges those who study tax law and history to broaden their landscape, and those in sister disciplines to confront the insidious links of slave systems and taxation. Taxation was not neutral, shaping outcomes and behaviors via incentives and disincentives that institutionalized slavery.

One is quickly captivated by this well-written and engaging volume. Archival materials are meticulously referenced and effectively used. Integration of secondary sources underscores the author’s grasp of diverse literatures. The terse writing aptly provokes reflection on the evil of slavery systems.

After the introductory exposition of the research thesis, Part One examines the colonial society of South Carolina from the late seventeenth century to the revolutionary era. Three chapters incrementally build the case of how taxation moved from experimentation through early laws and slave codes to questions of profits, economic self-interest, and the refinement of who and what should be the object and/or subject of taxation. For example, the tax system grappled with capital punishment that reduced the value of a slaveowner’s “property.” Should slaveowners be compensated in such situations or was it a cost of doing business? Intertwined in these debates were moral issues that generally lost the argument to concerns over financial compensation. Incrementally, the system came to reflect and adopt a hybrid approach. It provided compensation to slaveowners for enslaved persons convicted and executed for capital crimes, yet required the tax system via legislation to pay such compensation from the public treasury. The dynamic system confronted the difficulty of following the letter of the law and its (in)ability to handle mitigating circumstances. For instance, should a slaveowner be compensated for the murder of an enslaved person by another, as in the case of Scipio (pp. 85, 107), whose actions were deemed commendable—commendable in that they aligned with the tenets of the slave system itself.

At the end of this era, the tax system had become routinized and efficient. Enslaved persons remained mostly anonymous, objects of taxation due to accounting for them as a form of property. The system served other functions beyond its redistributive one. Its carrot-and-stick approach worked in tandem with efforts to advance racial balancing—promoting the immigration of “poor Protestants” to increase the white population and its power, while deterring the importation (as opposed to immigration) of Blacks. The deft inclusion of newspaper sources, personal archives, and in-depth synopses provide context missing from legal and tax documents that present enslaved persons in an impersonal and invisible manner. The evidence convincingly demonstrates the centrality of slavery in colonial South Carolina.

Part Two switches from a colony with slavery as its initial building block to colonies with diverse social and institutional contexts. Their slavery and tax systems reflected these contextual circumstances. Trading off depth for breadth, three chapters investigate much time and geography from the Northern colonies (Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut) to the Middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware), and lastly, to the Southern colonies (Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina). The themes mirror those explored earlier: (1) debates over enslaved persons as property or people; (2) tax implications of policy choices; (3) racial balancing; and (4) efforts to shape economic behavior through taxation. The analysis reinforces the embeddedness of taxation in society, but also its contextualization. For instance, unlike South Carolina, which began as a slave society, the other Southern colonies “became slave societies” (p. 171, emphasis in the original). Policies in the Northern colonies demonstrated learning by doing, including adopting policies from elsewhere, yet adapting them to reflect the role of slavery in individual economies. The Middle colonies exhibited features of their northern and southern neighbors, while using the taxation and legal systems to meet local circumstances.

Chapter reflections and the Conclusion motivate the questioning of this legacy. The taxation system enabled white society to flourish by exploiting Blacks and Indigenous peoples (the latter who appear at intervals as “Native Americans”). Do we perpetuate this legacy, or as Infanti notes, “it might just be possible now to tap into the creative potential of the taxing power to work toward correcting those and other racial injustices, much as colonial legislators did long ago when they elected to use the power to tax to end the slave trade” (p. 216).