Experience leads one to be wary of fulsome back-cover blurbs. But when the blurbster is Jack Greene and his assessment is of a book that may well be one of the most important studies of colonial America in the last quarter-century, well – one pays attention. For a groundbreaking book, Freedom Bound begins conservatively, with John Smith's 1616 vision of the abundant possibilities for New World settlements. But here, as elsewhere in the closely argued pages that follow, Tomlins challenges our readings of familiar evidence. In this case it is the context and import of Smith's comments and his critique of metropolitan get-rich-quick schemes in Virginia. Rather than a misty-eyed celebration of what honest toil might contribute to a future American state, Smith argued for the settling of free men over centrally driven, elaborate plans devoted to the extension of kingship. The opening pages draw our attention to debates concerning colonization for which law provided the enabling mechanism: law justified expansion and sovereign claims over distant lands, and it provided the diverse organizational models within which migrants departed and settled. In each case law not only figured in but also, Tomlins argues, constituted colonization. But this is not the law, or not only the law, with which we are familiar from previous early American historiography: law carried to the colonies as English birthright or cultural inheritance and unpacked and adapted to suit colonial conditions, law that provides merely a framework for action. The law in Freedom Bound is active and inventive: it is a “technology that shapes conditions and action in accordance with its own conditions of formation and existence” (390). This law, as Tomlins has been arguing for some time, is best understood discursively as legalities: conditions, mechanisms, and classificatory impulses that have it in their power to name, blame, and claim. And at the heart of colonization and its legalities was labour.

The book is in three parts and traces an argument that begins early in the sixteenth century and closes on the eve of the American Civil War. The first part is organized around the three core activities of colonization identified by the early promoter of English colonies Richard Hakluyt: “manning, planting and keeping.” Demonstrating that historians have long overestimated the centrality of indentured and bound workers in the early colonies, Tomlins argues that most early settlement labour was provided by free men and women and their families. Even in the Chesapeake, after the 1620s, indentured servants never comprised more than one-quarter of the population, and the decisive shift to slavery did not take place until towards the end of the century. Once made aware of this blind spot, Tomlins urges, we can study all forms of labour, bound and free, and their local and legal differentiation by age, gender, and race. The next three chapters consider the intellectual and legal background to colonization, including the derivation of the notion of transportable indentured servitude and the letters patent that provided for the relocation of English sovereignty overseas. These and other colonization mechanisms drew upon various influences – Reformation Christianity, natural law, and humanism – in addition to the familiar dynastic and commercial imperatives. Not surprisingly, these diverse influences generated varied imperial objectives and outcomes, ranging from the establishment of sovereign possessions to the idealistic creation of new kinds of community unattainable in England. The going can get a bit heavy here. But the key theme is that while Spanish colonization implied the conquest and exploitation of indigenous peoples overseen by a centrally directed bureaucracy, the patchwork and fragility of early English ventures (not least owing to Indian resistance) generated various forms of settlement and legal discourse: from crown-licensed conquests, to chartered corporate enterprises that aimed at egalitarian commonwealths, and delegated seignorial privileges that sought to re-create feudal hierarchies. Collectively these different organizational and legal forms secured English colonial sovereignty in the face of indigenous and competing European claims.

Where metropolitan planning and legalities fell short, however, was in the ambition to fix the character of colonial institutions and economies. The opportunity cost of the success of England's colonization was communities that reflected the diverse ambitions and prejudices of planners and settlers who arrived with distinctive and sometimes competing habits, customs, and attitudes to settlement, work, and governance. These differences and their implications are considered in part 2, chapters 5 through 7. Here Tomlins deftly synthesizes a generation or more of English social history describing regional variations and the emergence of local and centralized-state authorities in the wake of the Reformation and dissolution of the monasteries. In arable and pastoral regions law mediated economic relations and generated distinctive attitudes to government and authority, some looking to manorial lords and others to local elites and community solidarity. Tomlins traces these same influences through early migrant streams to America, championing in passing a similar approach adopted by David Hackett Fisher some years ago. With little to counteract English tendencies towards atomization and provincialism and plenty to accentuate them, the colonists and their leaders founded diverse systems of governance, law, and labour. Thus migrants to New England in the 1620s and the Delaware Valley after 1675 established settlements around households and community solidarity in which labour was familial and often mobile; wage and price controls failed, in part, because from the outset labouring people were part of the region's civic order of formal freedom. In contrast, the Chesapeake developed a more hierarchical, lordly culture and pressure came from individual free planters for opportunities to work on their own behalf; they also demanded the recruitment of labour to work for them and this, and the intensification of tobacco production, encouraged the drift away from earlier civic and idealistic ambitions in preference for the ad hoc contrivance of indentured servitude and ultimately slavery. In both regions, Tomlins shows, conditions and labour needs dictated that when the courts dealt with disputes between free labourers and their employers they aimed more for mediation than for coercion. In addition, the peculiarly colonial coexistence of free labour and unfree, legally subordinated working populations encouraged the development of noteworthy legal and civic rights for the former for white male and even female workers. In this and myriad other ways colonies cut across older cultural affinities, rearranged hierarchies of rule, and fostered practices that made them appear and feel increasingly less English than they had once supposed themselves to be.

Part 3 breaks off from the narrative survey of colonial development and offers three chapters that press home an argument regarding the intimate relationship between colonization, law, and labour. It is in this final part that Tomlins also engages the conceits of the natural-rights philosophers and economic theorists, most notably John Locke and Adam Smith, and those who make claims on behalf of America's liberal tradition. In brief, chapter 8 challenges the liberal reading of the eighteenth-century rise of contractualism and natural-rights theories, not least in the exchange of labour for wages, as a logical and ineluctable transition from an earlier ancien régime of hierarchy and subordination towards a modern society of equality and consent. This assumption has been pervasive, Tomlins argues, from the classics of eighteenth-century political theory through to modern historiography. In the latter case it has brought together the unlikeliest of bedfellows: for example, E. P. Thompson – hesitantly towards the end of Whigs and Hunters – and Gordon S. Wood, enthusiastically throughout his substantial and influential oeuvre. Perhaps it also accounts, one now reflects, for previous historians' fascination with bound and enslaved labour, and relative disinterest in free labour, in the early settlement colonies. The point is that this liberal tale is only sustainable if we ignore the now well-documented re-creation of hierarchies and inequalities, not least racial and patriarchal, which underpinned the new relations of “free labour.” There was a transition, Tomlins argues, but not from subordination to independence. Instead, one set of relations – within which some were subordinated and others enjoyed a measure of freedom and advantage, for example possessing civic privileges – was replaced by new, natural-law and liberal principles with different but no less hierarchical relations of subordination. Stripped of earlier customary rights and civic privileges, “free” workers sold their labour subject to private contracts agreed between legal equals occupying inescapably unequal economic conditions. Rather than a self-congratulatory transition from status to contract, the origin of liberalism lies in the passage from lordship to consent, but consent mediated and constrained by hierarchies of race, gender, and the market (383).

In the penultimate chapter, Tomlins considers colonial slavery and the legal inventiveness needed to articulate an Anglo-American law of bondage in a variety of forms and contexts. Ideas of race and difference were already present in the late sixteenth century, for example in the character of Aron the Moor in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus. And the exploitation of labour was clearly essential to the work of colonization. Reconciling the brute fact of slavery with America's redemptive view of itself has led to two general strategies. The first emphasizes the codependence of slavery and freedom across time and space, a useful if frustratingly nonspecific assessment. The second associates slavery with other, ancien régime forms of subordination and claims that it was set on a path to extinction by the ideas and principles articulated in the American Revolution. Given the Constitution's infamous compromises on the limited applicability of, in theory, universal natural rights, and pondering the massive expansion and productivity of antebellum slavery, it is not hard to see why Tomlins has little patience for this latter view. More productively, considered in light of other colonial labour and legal regimes, slavery was the most extreme form of legal codification. Its origins are located not in the racial prejudices or economic interests of the early Chesapeake, but in European and Catholic traditions of natural law and arguments concerning the status of captives, criminals and savages. This, some will be surprised to learn, accounts for why the first colonial instantiation of American slavery was not in the regulation of southern plantation labour but in a 1641 Massachusetts law addressing the status of Indian captives taken in the 1637 Pequot War. Thereafter Tomlins surveys, region by region, how the colonies drew upon an expanding resource of legal discourse shot through with race prejudice and economic ambition to create a series of regimes that, collected together, formed the eighteenth-century Anglo-American law of slavery.

The final chapter jumps forward to the crisis surrounding the Dred Scott case and the descent into Civil War. This transition from the American Revolution, where we left the narrative, via a discussion of slavery across the entire colonial period, may strike some as a tad ambitious. It certainly expands the potential audience for the book, although one suspects that the Civil War folks may read back from chapters 8 and 9 and the interest of early americanists will wane by the time they reach the review of Justice Roger B. Taney's judgment. The point, of course, is that legalities need to be reckoned over the longue durée and are not easily pegged to the events and periods of traditional historiography. And it is in the Civil War, rather than the American Revolution, that the relationship between law, colonization, and labour that Tomlins has traced over the preceding two centuries terminates. By the late eighteenth century, the colonial patchwork of commonwealths and distinctive jurisdictions and labour regimes enshrined in the federal Constitution was already coalescing into “free” and slave sections. Two generations on, Lincoln's refusal to abide by the terms of this constitutional bisectionalism and his second inaugural declaration on behalf of a union cleansed of slavery repudiated the conjunction of un/freedom derived from America's colonial past. Of course, the precise nature of the political and legal transformation effected by the Civil War was and continues to be hotly debated. But the reconfiguration of the state and its relationship to the law and labour marked an epistemological and irreversible break with the past.

So, does Freedom Bound deserve Jack Greene's Carlsburg-esque blurb as probably the most important book in early American history in last twenty-five years? At just under six hundred pages it is not going to be easy to set as required reading, even in a graduate seminar. But teachers will want to assign individual sections and chapters – for the early period part 1, for the eighteenth-century chapter 8, and for the debates on the origins and character of colonial slavery chapter 9a. Critics may challenge the structuralist assessment of colonization and the presentation of cause and effect: at points Freedom Bound seems more concerned with free labour than with labourers who were free; apart from intellectuals, colonial leaders, and a handful of others there are not many individual stories; subjects are mostly referred to in the aggregate – as colonists, workers, women, and slaves; and the notion of agency that animated so much of the social history upon which Tomlins draws takes something of a back seat to shifts within the overarching legal culture. Related to this, others might argue that much of the argument and its regional foci rest on existing and well-known secondary studies: Daniel Vickers, Stephen Innes, Barry Levy, Kathleen Brown, and a host of others make regular appearances in the notes, so what's new? Alternatively, even to name these studies which have inspired and directed much early American history over the last thirty years is to note their limitations and point up the scale of Tomlins's achievement. When he addresses early modern English historiography, in part 2, we are taken through debates concerning the character and development of early modern England. The early American literature, by contrast, has for too long been mired in provincial and, at best, regional particularity. What we have long needed is an original and challenging interpretation of early America as a whole. Is there another recent, and not so recent, book that has offered or even attempted the scope and provocation given in Freedom Bound? I can't think of one. Can you?