The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (Hill and Wang Critical Issues) - Softcover

Wood, Betty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809016087 ISBN 13: 9780809016082

Publisher: Hill and Wang, 1998

Synopsis

The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics.

The Origins of American Slavery is a short analysis that shows the complex rationale behind the English establishment of American slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new assessment of a pivotal time in the formation of what was to become the United States offers thought-provoking insights into the English influence on the development of the "peculiar institution."

About this title

About the Author

Betty Wood, a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, is the author of several award-winning articles and two previous books on American slavery.

From the Back Cover

Though the English did not begin their colonization of the New World with the intention of enslaving anyone, by the end of the seventeenth century chattel slavery existed in each of England's American colonies. Why? And why did the English enslave West Africans rather than native Americans or Europeans? Historians have usually stressed either racial ideology or determining economic and demographic factors, but Betty Wood suggests that a more complex rationale was at work. In this important new analysis, Wood begins by exploring the meanings of freedom and bondage in sixteenth-century English thought and the ideas that men and women of Tudor England had about Africans and native Americans. She studies their prejudices against non-Christians, their responses to models of slavery in the Spanish and French colonies, and their assessment of their own labor shortages, and in the light of these various factors interprets the decision of the English to resort to slave labor in the colonies. She then follows the spread of slavery through the seventeenth century, from the Caribbean and the Carolinas to Virginia tobacco country and finally among the Puritans and Quakers farther north.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill and Wang
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809016087
• ISBN 13: 9780809016082
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144