The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies [Paperback]

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

The Origins of American Slaveryis 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.

Wood writes with remarkable clarity about a subject that has vexed historians for decades. Illuminating, subtle, provocative,The Origins of American Slaveryexplains the evolution of a system of permanent bondage based on race. Carol Berkin, author of First Generations

A valuable addition to the scholarship on New World slavery. Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

Why did British colonists in America adopt and accept the practice of slavery so readily when there existed no model of slavery at home in Britain? Wood poses and attempts to answer this perplexing historical question by investigating the earliest origins of American slavery and the initial response of the colonists to the enslavement of West Africans. Rather than enslaving Native Americans or other Europeans, the colonists singled out Africans as their victims. The exclusive nature of this practice has led many to believe that the slave systems established in English America were rooted solely in racial prejudice. Others cite economic and demographic realities as the primary cause of the institutionalization of slavery. Wood's analysis reveals that a more complex dynamic involving a myriad of economic, cultural, social, religious, and ethnic considerations was necessary to forge the development and contribute to the widespread acceptance of slavery in the Caribbean islands and on the American mainland. An important contribution to the lSk