California, a Slave State

“A devastatingly detailed, urgent, and somewhat regretful confirmation of an inconvenient truth: Far from being the place where everyone got an equal chance, California embraced slavery from the outset. . . . That boosterish tale of California’s endless possibility turns out to have been built with sweat, oppression, coercion, and genocide. It was precisely California’s openness, Pfaelzer posits, that allowed greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy to run amok, and it is this bitter irony—not the orange groves or Mediterranean climate—that makes us (that fraught word) exceptional.”—Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times

“A historian explains how California ‘welcomed, honed and legalized’ human bondage for 250 years, from the legalized enslavement of Native Americans to forced labor in today’s prisons.”—New York Times Book Review

“A searing survey of ‘250 years of human bondage’ in what is now the state of California. . . . Pfaelzer traces the practices of today’s prison system, such as the leasing of convicts to private employers as forced labor, back to the various slave trades that occurred in California, and makes an irrefutable case that unpaid labor was a major engine of the state’s economic growth. Readers will be outraged.”—Publishers Weekly

“This wide-ranging history encompasses the Spanish conquest of Indigenous peoples and the trafficking of sex workers today, looking underneath the veneer of sunshine to reveal the dark undercurrents that have long powered California’s economy.”—Alta Journal

“A powerful history of California’s varied systems of servitude, this book extends across three centuries, exploring bondage, resistance, and how servitude has shaped life in the golden state.”—Benjamin Madley, author of An American Genocide

“California has long asserted a proud legacy as a ‘free state.’ Jean Pfaelzer exposes huge rifts in that glossy narrative, including contemporary practices. A stunning aggregation of evidence through extraordinary research.”—Franklin Odo, Amherst College

“This capacious book excavates California’s brutal history of multi-racial bondage. After reading it, we will never see the Golden State’s celebrated diversity—or the stories the nation tells itself about its racial past—in the same way.”—P. Gabrielle Foreman, The Colored Conventions Project

“Through prolific storytelling using a range of human characters, Jean Pfaelzer takes us through the long California story of slavery and unfreedom in its many forms, offering a powerful revision of the state’s history.”—Philip Deloria, author of Playing Indian