“In, Berlin emphasises that slavery, too often treated by historians as a static institution, was in fact constantly changing. “Berlin, who has already contributed significantly to the literature, here brings together in a magisterial synthesis much of what has now been learned about slave life during its first two centuries within the present United States… Berlin’s achievement is to order the resulting variety by identifying four different regions with four different economies (the Chesapeake, the eastern tidewater from South Carolina to Florida, the Mississippi Valley, and the North) and by dividing the social developments of two centuries in each region into three periods, which he designates as the charter generations, the plantation generations, and the Revolutionary generations, stopping short of the heyday of slavery in the antebellum decades of the nineteenth century. ” -David Brion Davis, American Historical Review “In this book, Berlin has produced a masterly synthesis of the vast body of research hundreds of scholars have done on the first two centuries of slavery in British, French, and Spanish North America, a portrait of highly fortuitous change that should leave a telltale stamp on all future treatments of New World slavery.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |