In Fictions of Consent, Urvashi Chakravarty examines the ideologies of slavery that emerged in early modern England, prior to the establishment of an organized trade in enslaved individuals. Challenging the notion that England was innocent of racialized slavery, she argues that early modern narratives of freedom must be scrutinized for the frameworks of slavery they inadvertently created. Slavery was not an external issue; rather, its ideologies permeated everyday English life, from family dynamics to the theater and particularly in grammar school classrooms, where the legacies of classical slavery were taught and negotiated. The English appropriated the Roman freedman's stigma to signify bondage linked to physical differences, while early modern concepts of voluntary service laid the groundwork for later representations of happy slavery in the Atlantic world. Chakravarty highlights how early texts foreshadow the heritability of slavery in America, revealing its deep entrenchment within familial structures and the role of bloodlines in shaping racialized futures of enslavement. This work engages with early modern literary and cultural studies, critical race studies, and the histories of law, education, and labor, uncovering the conceptual roots of slavery and servitude and the everyday contexts in which racialized slavery was established. Despite claims of purity, Chakravarty illustrates that slavery was fundamentally an Engli
