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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.
This new assessment of a pivotal time in the formation of the United States gives us thought-provoking insights into the role of the English in the development of the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
- From the dust jacket.
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Previews available in: English
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The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (Critical Issue)
March 4, 1998, Hill and Wang
Paperback
in English
0809016087 9780809016082
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2
The origins of American slavery: freedom and bondage in the English colonies
1997, Hill and Wang
in English
0809074567 9780809074563
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3
The origins of American slavery: freedom and bondage in the English colonies
1997, Hill and Wang
in English
- 1st ed.
0809074567 9780809074563
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Includes bibliographical references (p. [118]-126) and index.
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- Created April 1, 2008
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August 17, 2018 | Edited by Herb Kruger | added description |
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