Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World (review)

Rebecca Goetz examines legal and religious texts from seventeenth-century Virginia to demonstrate how European settlers used baptism to solidify their identities as white Christians and those of the African people they held in captivity as black slaves. First freed by her mulatto mistress and then later by the French father of her children, the Senegambia-born house servant fled during the Haitian Revolution to Cuba only to return to Haiti soon after independence.