| The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies Contributor(s): Wood, Betty (Author) |
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ISBN: 0809016087 ISBN-13: 9780809016082 Publisher: Hill & Wang OUR PRICE: $14.40 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: March 1998 Annotation: 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. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | United States - Colonial Period (1600-1775) - Social Science | Slavery |
| Dewey: 973.2 |
| LCCN: 96036025 |
| Series: Hill and Wang Critical Issues |
| Physical Information: 0.5" H x 5.5" W x 8.3" (0.40 lbs) 144 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher 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." |
Contributor Bio(s): Wood, Betty: - Betty Wood, a fellow of Girton College, Cambridge, is the author of several award-winning articles and two previous books on American slavery. |