³⁵ Kristen Block, “Nell, Yaff, and Lewis: ‘He Hath made all Nations of one Blood,’” part 4, in Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean; and Block, Kristen, “Cultivating Inner and Outer Plantations: Property, Industry, and Slavery in Early Quaker Migration to the New World,” Early American Studies, An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 3 (2010): 515–548CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Plank, Geoffrey, “Discipline and Divinity: Colonial Quakerism, Christianity, and ‘Heathenism’ in the Seventeenth Century,” Church History 85, no. 3 (September 2016): 502–528CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ On the relationship between religion and race in the colonial period in the English Atlantic world, see especially Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia; Bailey, Richard A., Race and Redemption in Puritan New England, repr. edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Kopelson, Faithful Bodies; and Kidd, Colin, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the relationship between religion and race in colonial Latin America, see Bennett, Herman L., Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Martínez, María Elena, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Delgado, Jessica and Moss, Kelsey, “Race and Religion in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, ed. Lum, Kathryn Gin and Harvey, Paul (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar. For the continued co-constitution of religion and race in the United States, see especially Weisenfeld, Judith, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; and Gin Lum and Harvey, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History.

³⁷ Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico; McKinley, Michelle A., Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru, Pitt Latin American Series (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012); and Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean.

³⁸ I am hardly the first person to point this out. Frank Tannenbaum made this observation back in 1946 and spawned the field of Comparative Slavery: Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage, 1946)Google Scholar. Tannenbaum's thesis has been rightfully criticized for a number of reasons, especially for his suggestion that some forms of slavery were more “humane” than others. But a number of scholars have acknowledged that, despite its shortcomings, the Tannenbaum thesis has remained relevant because a number of his observations regarding the legal and religious differences among colonial empires require explanation. For revised approaches to the “Tannenbaum debate,” see especially de la Fuente, Alejandro, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 339–369CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and de la Fuente, Alejandro and Gross, Ariela, “Comparative Studies of Law, Slavery, and Race in the Americas,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6, no. 1 (2010): 469–485CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ It's also crucial to note that many Africans, particularly in the Kingdom of Kongo, were already Catholic. For the history of Kongolese Catholicism, see especially Thornton, John, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History 25, no. 2 (1984): 147–167CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thornton, John, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fromont, Cécile, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For those who were not already Catholic, the preparation for baptism varied widely throughout Latin America. In some cases, enslaved people were given a cursory baptism with no instruction. In other cases, baptism was part of a longer process that included education. In Latin American cities, confraternities of enslaved and free black Catholics flourished. In other cases, especially on large rural plantations, baptism was sometimes withheld, although slave owners could be (and sometimes were) taken to court for their failure to baptize enslaved laborers. Overall, the process and preparation for baptism was fiercely debated within Catholic empires. For one Jesuit missionary's perspective, see Sandoval, Alonso de, Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute, trans. von Germeten, Nicole (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008)Google Scholar. That said, the expectation throughout Catholic empires was that all enslaved people would be baptized as Catholics.

⁴⁰ On the changing Dutch approach to Protestantism and slavery, see Haefeli, Evan, “Breaking the Christian Atlantic: The Legacy of Dutch Toleration,” in The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, ed. van Groesen, Michiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 124–145CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rupert, Linda, “‘Seeking the Water of Baptism’: Fugitive Slaves and Imperial Jurisdiction in the Early Modern Caribbean,” in Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500–1800, ed. Benton, Lauren and Ross, Richard (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 199–232Google Scholar; and Dewulf, Jeroen, “Emulating a Portuguese Model,” Journal of Early American History 4, no. 1 (January 2014): 3–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ For the colonial period, see especially Raboteau, Slave Religion; Sobel, Mechal, Trabelin’ on: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Frey and Wood, Come Shouting to Zion; Frey, Sylvia R., “The Visible Church: Historiography of African American Religion since Raboteau,” Slavery & Abolition 29, no. 1 (January 2008): 83–110CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sensbach, Jon F., Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Young, Jason R., Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and Andrews, Edward E., Native Apostles: Black and Indian Missionaries in the British Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² As Block notes in her response, I elaborate upon this point in a separate article: Gerbner, “Theorizing Conversion.”

⁴³ See especially Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; and Brown, Christopher Leslie, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ “Ein Schreiben von 50 Negern an den König von Dänemark, aufgesetzt und unterschrieben von Pieter Mingo,” 1739, R.15.Ba.3.60, Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität, Herrnhut, Germany.

⁴⁵ “Marotta to the Queen of Denmark,” 1739, R.15.Ba.3.61, Unitätsarchiv der Evangelischen Brüder-Unität, Herrnhut, Germany.