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

by Betty Wood

Book Overview

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

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809016087
• ISBN13: 9780809016082
• Release Date: March 1998
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Very satisfactory

I ordered this for my granddaughter. She needed it for college and couldn't get it locally. We needed it right away. She got it 3 days after I ordered it. I didn't even know this was possible. We did not pay extra for overnight shipping

Good book, but could be better

Ms. Woods examination of the attitudes that led to enslavement of Africans and Native Americans is well done, but I wish she'd brought out some of the similarity in attitudes toward indigenous European culture, the Irish for instance. The same attitude of being "hardly human," and "savage," the callousness with which they were eliminated from their land in the late 1500's and the slavery that they experienced (200 Irish women were sent to Barbados as wives for black slaves, for instance) points to a bias which was cultural as well as racial. Well worth reading, however.