Some people might think this book offers a smoking gun of complicity: Aha, those sanctimonious New Englanders were just as tied to slavery as the Southerners! But complicity seems too easy. Isn’t everyone, in one way or another, complicit in systems of exploitation that sometimes they choose not to see, and that sometimes they can’t see? What’s interesting then, is not complicity or non-complicity. I suggest we take complicity as a given and then look for the ways in which it is lived at a given moment by specific historical actors. I hope that readers come to see that our own moment doesn’t give us a cut-and-dry option regarding complicity in structures of economic and ecological exploitation. We should start with the premise that it may be very difficult to find ourselves with clean hands under the configuration of the world that we presently inhabit—and then figure out what we want to do about it. {read}