Cameron Seglias's "Settling Debt"

Cameron Seglias is Assistant Professor of American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Settling Debt: Antislavery and Colonial Crisis, with the following results:

Page 99 analyzes several passages from the fascinating eighteenth-century Quaker Ralph Sandiford, an antislavery writer who is still not well known outside of specialist circles. In these passages, Sandiford reflects on the corruption of religious and political elites who profit from racialized slavery and the traffic in enslaved Africans. As I put it on page 99: “Sandiford’s point is that the ‘unrighteous’ enslaving ministers that ‘teach, or oversee, or discipline the Church...have lost their Savour of the Gospel.’ And as long as they continue to ‘preach to others, they...become Castaways, and draw their Flock with them to Perdition.’” In order to resist these enslavers, Sandiford felt that he must make his testimony public through printing his antislavery books. Like others before him (including John Milton), Sandiford believed in the centrality of press freedom for democracy and self-governance.

I still remember working on earlier drafts of what would eventually become page 99. There was something even then that made this page feel particularly dense to me. Perhaps this is because a number of central ideas of the book—especially around questions of religious and political authority—are knotted together in the material that is quoted and analyzed on this page. In other words, page 99 probably is not the best browser’s shortcut for my book, if only because too much context is needed to understand what is being said on it.

Even while I don’t think the Page 99 Test works for my book, the chapter of which page 99 is a part could serve as an entry into the book. The writer I focus on in that chapter (Ralph Sandiford) is a kind of key to unlocking the main arguments and themes of Settling Debt. It was while working on Sandiford’s writing that I figured out what my book is really about. I can sum this up in a quote from his work, in which he says that being involved with racialized slavery makes one a “Debtor and Oppressor in the Creation.”

Learn more about Settling Debt at the Cornell University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue