Volume 51, Number 18 · November 18, 2004
What Slavery Was Really Like
By Gordon S. Wood
Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World
by Trevor Burnard
University of North Carolina Press, 320 pp., $39.95; $19.95 (paper)
Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation
by Rhys Isaac
Oxford University Press, 423 pp., $35.00
One of the greatest achievements of historical scholarship during the past half-century has been the imaginative recovery of at least some of the realities of slavery in the New World. Indeed, in the past several decades we have acquired knowledge of the size of the African diaspora and the nature of slavery in the Americas that was not even imagined by earlier generations of historians. Between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century at least 11 or 12 million slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas. It is evident now, if it never was before, that the development and prosperity of the European colonies in the New World depended upon the labor of these millions of African slaves and their enslaved descendants. Slavery existed everywhere in the Americas, from the villages of French Canada to the sugar plantations of Portuguese Brazil.
Review, 4317 words
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