The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (Critical Issue) - Hardcover

Though there was no tradition of slavery in England, it was the norm throughout British colonies in North America and the Caribbean by the end of the 17th century. Historian Betty Wood examines the reasons for its spread in this scholarly, but readable, book. She begins by noting that the British believed slavery was appropriate for non-Christian foreigners, and that Africans belonged to that category. Once the need for cheap labor in the Americas became apparent, planters turned to Africa, and slavery, which had once seemed unthinkable, spread throughout the colonies in an unholy alliance of these two factors--racism and economics.

Though the English did not begin their colonization of the New World with the intention of enslaving anyone, by the end of the seventeenth century chattel slavery existed in each of England's American colonies. Why? And why did the English enslave West Africans rather than native Americans or Europeans? Historians have usually stressed either racial ideology or determining economic and demographic factors, but Betty Wood suggests that a more complex rationale was at work. In this important new analysis, Wood begins by exploring the meanings of freedom and bondage in sixteenth-century English thought and the ideas that men and women of Tudor England had about Africans and native Americans. She studies their prejudices against non-Christians, their responses to models of slavery in the Spanish and French colonies, and their assessment of their own labor shortages, and in the light of these various factors interprets the decision of the English to resort to slave labor in the colonies. She then follows the spread of slavery through the seventeenth century, from the Caribbean and the Carolinas to Virginia tobacco country and finally among the Puritans and Quakers farther north.