The grateful slave of George Boulukos's title performs a good deal of hard cultural labor. This important contribution to the growing body of work on the relationship between sentimental writing, slavery, and conceptions of human difference in the eighteenth century focuses on the ubiquitous figure of the grateful slave whose thankfulness and devotion can never measure up to the master's kindness. Often understood as serving the cause of anti-slavery in its attention to African suffering in the colonies, the grateful slave, Boulukos argues, generates arguments for amelioration rather than emancipation, for racial difference rather than human likeness. Thus although the trope at first glance seems to register the common humanity of slaves (in recognizing their suffering and their capacity for emotion), the grateful slave instead plays a critical role in the elaboration of concepts of racial hierarchy, as the immoderate and misplaced gratitude of the slave is shown to signal the irrational, dependent, and passionate nature of the African: the slave's unreadiness for freedom. The grateful slave thereby bridges “a transatlantic gap in racial consciousness, between the practice of white supremacy in the middle passage and the colonies and the metropolitan discourse insisting on the unity of humankind” (38). Reversing recent claims made about the humanizing power of sentimental figures to create belief in human commonality, Boulukos argues that the grateful slave trope inculcates insidious lessons about racial difference that metropolitan readers would find unpalatable in more overt form.

In Boulukos's account, sentimental images of enthusiastically submissive slaves offer the metropolitan public a more palatable vision of colonial practices, enabling them to support the broader system while deploring its structural effects as unfortunate excesses. The self-serving fiction that Africans may be made not only to accept but also voluntarily to embrace their subjugation enabled an ideological return to a precontractual patriarchal social order grounded in obligation and paternalistic benevolence at the same time as it advanced arguments for ameliorative reforms that left the broader system intact and even augmented production under a new, ostensibly humane, disciplinary regime. Inasmuch as the slave's humanity is tested and confirmed through expressions of gratitude toward benevolent masters, it exists only in and through the conditions of their continued subjection.

The book's six chronologically ordered chapters trace the evolution of the grateful slave trope in relation to a growing commitment to concepts of essential or natural human difference. The opening chapters address the relative neutrality of seventeenth-century travelers’ accounts of Africans (including an excellent discussion of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs as a possible antecedent for images of colonial torture) and the curtailed identification of the eponymous hero of Daniel Defoe's 1722 Colonel Jack with the slaves he oversees, while the middle portion of the book turns to the relationship between arguments for amelioration in midcentury sentimental novels and the intensifying discourses of race in the pamphlet war around the 1772 Mansfield Decision. Boulukos examines the ways writers of the black Atlantic such as Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano resisted the image of the grateful slave, concluding with the consolidation of concepts of racial difference in the 1790s, when, according to Boulukos, the underlying concepts of amelioration and racial difference harbored within the grateful slave trope have “finally become so familiar that they could be taken for granted. … The passionate, irrational nature of Africans, marking their inferiority, became a given” (204).

Boulukos is not, however, simply arguing that transformations in the grateful slave trope serve as a kind of barometer of shifting perceptions of racial difference; his provocative claim is that the trope helps engineer these transformations: “the image of the grateful slave enabled the transition, at its most dramatic between 1770 and 1790, to a raced view of humanity throughout the British Atlantic world in the wake of the racialization of colonial slavery itself ” (7). Thus Boulukos contends that the arguments for amelioration in midcentury novels such as Sarah Scott's Sir George Ellison and Henry Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigné might anticipate the accounts about racial differences advanced by the West Indian lobby: it is possible that “the articulation of difference in metropolitan debates represents the beginning of conscious theoretical racism not just for the metropole, but even for the colonies themselves” (99). Although his claim that “defending colonial practices— rather than simply engaging in them—entailed the development of a theory for their justification” (99) is persuasive, it raises methodological questions about the consequences of the seeming division of labor in the transatlantic framework of the argument, in which the colony at times seems to serve as site of practice and the metropole as site of theory/discourse.

This is, to be sure, a good deal of heavy lifting for a solitary figure, even a powerful one, to perform. At times the scope of the argument means that Boulukos is able to consider other factors—economic, political, scientific, religious—that contributed to the consolidation of concepts of racial difference only with enticing brevity, as in the suggestive but rapid survey of the treatment of race by Thomas Jefferson, Immanuel Kant, and l’abbé Raynal. The importance of decidedly unsentimental images of slaves—the Brookes' plan of a slave ship, for example—raises questions about the role played by depictions of the slave other than as grateful in the historical developments Boulukos describes. That two of the late-century novels addressed in the final chapter are translations from French, and hence originally from different, although related, political and literary traditions, suggests the ways the argument's transatlantic comparative perspective might be extended to its metropolitan contexts, while the curious fact that the grateful slaves in the texts Boulukos analyzes are almost without exception male allows us to speculate on the role of gender both in his argument about the construction of racial difference and in the coda's discussion of the supplanting of the grateful slave by the faithful plantation “Mammy” in antebellum American images. These questions, however, point to the ambitious scope of Boulukos's study and should not detract from critical appreciation of—and gratitude for—this significant contribution to eighteenth-century studies.