The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (Critical Issue)
Author(s):
Betty Wood
Label: Hill and Wang
Publisher(s):
Hill and Wang
Studio: Hill and Wang
Manufacturer: Hill and Wang
Binding: Paperback
List Price: $13.00
Our Price: $13.00
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
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."
Amazon.com Review
Though there was no tradition of slavery in England, it was the norm throughout British colonies in North America and the Caribbean by the end of the 17th century. Historian Betty Wood examines the reasons for its spread in this scholarly, but readable, book. She begins by noting that the British believed slavery was appropriate for non-Christian foreigners, and that Africans belonged to that category. Once the need for cheap labor in the Americas became apparent, planters turned to Africa, and slavery, which had once seemed unthinkable, spread throughout the colonies in an unholy alliance of these two factors--racism and economics.
Customer Reviews
A very useful little book
This is a very short book; the text is 117 pages. It has serious limitations. Wood knows nothing about West African society, so she misses the huge and obvious point that Africa was a slave society itself, and that the Europeans bought their slaves, at an already established market, as opposed to taking them by force. Wood has a lengthy discussion of the differing attitudes of the Europeans toward Africans and Native Americans which is almost comical in its irrelevance. She almost totally misses the point that Africans ended up enslaved, and Native Americans exterminated or driven west, not because of differing European attitudes toward them, but because of the huge and obvious differences between African and Native American culture and experience.
While this big part of the puzzle is missing from her analysis, the rest of her analysis is quite useful. She goes into a good discussion of English intellectual attitudes toward freedom and slavery during the 16th and 17th centuries. She also reaches the sensible conclusion that these abstract attitudes and values, in the end, had little impact on events. Instead, as she argues very cogently, economic motivations of the colonists, and past experience of other European colonies, was key. Specifically, leaving aside the New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers who immigrated for religious reasons, most of the early American colonists came here to get rich. And the "here" that English colonists first came to was not so much mainland America, whose early colonies did not do so well, but Barbados and other Caribbean islands. Consciously copying the Spanish and Portuguese earlier experiences, in Brazil and elsewhere, the English colonists created great wealth, very quickly, using slave labor, very brutually, to create sugar plantations. When there were only a few struggling English colonies on the mainland, Barbados was the richest single colony in English America. The wealth of this colony was created entirely by slave labor.
Most accounts of early American history miss the critical importance of Barbados. It was the model for the Deep South. And it was not just a model. Since Barbados itself is very small, it rapidly kicked off many would-be plantation owners who settled South Carolina and established its very distinctive society. This whole Barbados-South-Carolina-Cotton Country sequence is critical to understanding the economic logic of the development of slavery.
Woods also has an interesting account of the differing attitudes toward slavery among the Puritans and the Quakers in the North. Her conclusion is that had no great problem with slavery itself, but due to their economic circumstances, slavery was never more than a marginal institution in most of the North.
Incomplete treatise
The author does an excellent job of analyzing slavery, ex post facto. There is little information about the roots of slavery, specifically the institutionalization of slavery in Africa, well before Europeans began to use Africans as forced labor. Entire African nations were built on slavery. The American view of slavery is that Europeans went into the bush, captured slaves, and brought them back. Historical documents reflect that the slaves were bought from enormously wealthy and powerful black slave dealers along the Ivory Coast. Scholarly works should include the entire background of slavery if we are to understand this painful part of America's past as well as understand why it continues in parts of Africa to this day. A side note- the word "slave" has Slavic origins. Slaves were of European extract for centuries.
Good book, but could be better
Ms. Woods examination of the attitudes that led to enslavement of Africans and Native Americans is well done, but I wish she'd brought out some of the similarity in attitudes toward indigenous European culture, the Irish for instance. The same attitude of being "hardly human," and "savage," the callousness with which they were eliminated from their land in the late 1500's and the slavery that they experienced (200 Irish women were sent to Barbados as wives for black slaves, for instance) points to a bias which was cultural as well as racial. Well worth reading, however.
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