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

This brief book, part of a series oriented to undergraduates, provides a lucid and accessible synthesis of the scholarly debate concerning the roots of slavery in America. Why did the English colonists, who had not emigrated with a blueprint for slavery, decide on enslavement of West Africans rather than subjugation of fellow Europeans or Native Americans? Wood, a lecturer in history at Cambridge University, suggests ""a complex interaction"" of the two main influences argued by scholars: the colonists' racial prejudice and their economic need. She explains this first by distinguishing slavery from the indentured servitude experienced by white immigrants. West Africans were stereotyped pejoratively in England, she notes, while images of Native Americans were more mixed. The English were influenced by the agricultural organization of other European colonists, especially the Portuguese, Spanish and French, whose schema included black slaves. And the links between the colony of Barbados and the Carolina low country extended a slave system to the mainland. In Virginia tobacco country, Native Americans proved unwieldy captive workers; African slaves had less chance to escape. In Puritan New England, the smaller number of slaves had more opportunity to maintain their humanity, but, says Wood, they experienced more ""spiritual and cultural coercion"" than slaves in the South or the Caribbean. Thus slavery was entrenched throughout the colonies by the end of the 17th century. (Apr.)