Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern World
- Chapter 2 The English, the Dutch, and Transoceanic Migration
- Chapter 3 Europeans and African Slavery in the Americas
- Chapter 4 Gender and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World
- Chapter 5 Productivity in the Slave Trade
- Chapter 6 Africa and Europe in the Early Modern Era
- Chapter 7 The African Impact on the Transatlantic Slave Trade
- Chapter 8 The English Plantation Americas in Comparative Perspective
- Chapter 9 Ethnicity in the Early Modern Atlantic World
- Chapter 10 Europe and the Atlantic Slave Systems
- Epilogue on Abolition
- Appendices
- Maps
- Sources and Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Abbreviations
- Chapter 1 Slavery and Freedom in the Early Modern World
- Chapter 2 The English, the Dutch, and Transoceanic Migration
- Chapter 3 Europeans and African Slavery in the Americas
- Chapter 4 Gender and Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World
- Chapter 5 Productivity in the Slave Trade
- Chapter 6 Africa and Europe in the Early Modern Era
- Chapter 7 The African Impact on the Transatlantic Slave Trade
- Chapter 8 The English Plantation Americas in Comparative Perspective
- Chapter 9 Ethnicity in the Early Modern Atlantic World
- Chapter 10 Europe and the Atlantic Slave Systems
- Epilogue on Abolition
- Appendices
- Maps
- Sources and Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Slavery was an accepted element in human society for so long and reached its high point as an economic system so recently that the strong and continuing interest in the subject seems only proper. While the wrongs of slavery are among the few certainties in a postmodern world, in this, as in other areas of social activity, human behaviour and contradiction are inseparable. The aim of this work is to highlight the tensions that emerge as people pursue goals, moral or material, that cannot all be achieved at once or are at odds with some aspect of their individual and shared systems of belief. Chapter 1 begins with the puzzle of slavery and freedom emerging from the same roots in western society, and the volume ends with the morally ambiguous consequences of the abolition of coerced labor and the transportation system that supplied it. Historians should attempt to put some distance between scholarship and the values of the society in which he or she functions. We have more than enough evidence to condemn what happened in the past. No one who is aware of the below-deck conditions on a slave ship, how little these changed over three centuries, and how Europeans never subjected other Europeans to such an experience can fail to appreciate this point. Yet if condemn on the basis of modern values is all we do, then we are never likely to understand the past.
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- The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas , pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1999