Slavery and Emancipation (review)

This contribution to the series Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History explores the history of slavery in the anglophone North America that eventually became the United States. It does not explore the topic for all of North America and therefore does not consider the role of the Spanish, French, and Dutch spheres, and indeed neglects Canada. The book is intended as supplementary readings, including primary sources and excerpts from selected scholarly contributions, to a general overview of the subjects of slavery and emancipation, and hence concentrates on legal, economic, and political factors that shaped the course of American history.

The book is divided into fourteen sections that highlight the colonial origins of race and slavery in the anglophone North American context, the adaptation of enslaved Africans to their coerced environment, the formation of the 'master class,' the impact on the American Revolution on slavery, the growth of the cotton economy, the ideological and material world of the planter class, slave resistance in the nineteenth century, the Civil War, and emancipation. Each section has excerpts from three documents and one scholarly contribution intended to provide an overview.

There are many excellent excerpts in this collection, and indeed it is a useful addition to the literature on North American slavery. The editors point out that the debate within American historiography on slavery has centred on the debate over the extent to which plantation slavery was capitalist or paternalist, and largely focuses on the debate within white American society over the efficacy of the peculiar institution. As this collection reflects, slavery was strongly shaped by the development of plantations in the tidewater region of Virginia and coastal South Carolina. Moreover, the impact of the American Revolution, the cotton boom, and the crisis leading to the Civil War are given ample attention.

The collection can be compared with similar anthologies, such as that edited by Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (1999), which consists only of documents with short introductions, and hence represents well the voices of African-Americans. Taken together, these two collections contain a considerable body of text for use in teaching and indeed for reference.

Unfortunately, Slavery and Emancipation suffers from several defects that detract from its overall contribution. Despite its inclusion in a series devoted to social and cultural history, the focus largely overlooks the crucial role of Africans themselves in the shaping of North American society and culture. The selection from Equiano, for example, ignores the fact that he may well have been born in South Carolina, not Africa, and hence the value of the text is in remembered tradition, not personal experience. Moreover, Ira Berlin's interpretation of the African experience, which is the principal text dealing with African history, is questionable at best and often simply wrong. A collection such as this would have benefited from the inclusion of one or more scholarly excerpts from specialists in African history and diaspora.

The social and cultural history of slavery in North America has to address issues of cultural origin and specificity that draw on comparative study of the African diaspora in the context of African and Atlantic history. A major gap in the volume is the lack of such a perspective, so that topics focusing on slavery and emancipation in Spanish and French possessions of mainland North America that eventually became part of the United States are excluded. There is much more on the study of resistance to slavery, especially its cultural, religious, and ethnic dimensions, than is covered in this collection. On balance, the collection tends to reinforce older interpretations that fail to situate slavery in the United States in the broader context of the 'black Atlantic.' Slavery and Emancipation is a welcome addition when used in conjunction with other collections of documents and with scholarly interpretations that are not included in the volume.