Early Modern Slavery In The 1990s

The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. By Robin Blackburn. London: Verso Books, 1997. vi + 602 pp. Maps, notes, illustrations, and index. £30

Questioning Slavery. By James Walvin. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. xi + 202 pp. Notes and index. $19.99.

The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies. By Betty Wood. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997. 102 pp. Map, bibliography, and index. $18.00.

These three finely crafted books, written by senior scholars, offer useful surveys of the mercurial field of early American slavery. The books by Wood and Walvin are more modest in approach and provide synthetic introductions to the latest scholarly debates and conclusions about chattel bondage and the traffic in human souls. Blackburn's contribution, that weighs in at more than twice the size of the others combined, is also firmly based on recent scholarship and strives mightily to encompass slavery throughout the Atlantic world over five centuries.