Slavery in Puritan New England

Wendy Warren’s deeply researched New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America depends on investigation of handwritten texts rather than the several new databases about slavery and the slave trade. Warren has tracked down references in the extant literature and added research in unpublished court cases, wills, probate inventories, and private papers in New England as well in London. With her ability to convert a line or two in a court deposition or a will into an argument about the nature of New England slavery, Warren successfully circumvents the illegibility of the archive. The theme of this highly accessible study is how the immoral conjunction of cultivating staple crops for export and racialized slavery reshaped the entire Atlantic world, beginning with a fateful exchange of goods and people between the Caribbean and New England.