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Reviews of Books
The Captivity of a Generation
| Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. By Ira Berlin. (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. x, 374. $29.95.)
Reviewed by Peter A. Coclanis
, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Ira Berlin is this generation's preeminent historian of North American slavery. What Kenneth M. Stampp was for the 1950s, and what Eugene D. Genovese was for the 1960s and 1970s, Berlin has been for those that have come of age since the 1980s. His accomplishments over the course of the past thirty-odd years include an impressive monograph on free blacks in the antebellum South, several important co-edited collections on slavery, a hugely influential editing project relating to emancipation, and one-and-a-half benchmark syntheses of the history in North America of the (not very) peculiar institution.1 In so doing, he has established a reputation not only as a fine scholar but also as a generous one, encouraging and supporting other scholars in the field, particularly younger students of slavery. That he recently served as president of the Organization of American Historians demonstrates the esteem in which he is held by the current generation, which he represents exceptionally well.2 |
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Generations of Captivity represents Berlin very well, too, particularly when read and understood in the context of his much-acclaimed 1998 book, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Indeed, the more recent work can best be viewed as a reworking and extension of Many Thousands Gone, wherein Berlin reprises in condensed form his earlier discussion of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and adds two chapters on slavery in the nineteenth century. Given the seamlessness of the argument and the author's penchant for black vernacular, it would be pretty accurate, if not quite polite, to call the new section on the nineteenth century "Mo' Thousands Gone," or something like that. In any case, the new material—on the period between about 1810 and 1865—is rich and provocative. |
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Berlin actually began to lay out his basic approach and interpretation well before 1998, most notably in an influential 1980 essay in the American Historical Review entitled "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society on British Mainland North America." In this piece, Berlin pointed out that "time and space are the usual boundaries of historical inquiry," claimed that "the last generation of slavery studies in the United States ha[d] largely ignored these critical dimensions," and embarked upon his project to explore change across space and time.3 |
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In the small world of slavery studies, Berlin has become kind of a modern-day Heraclitus: in his view, no slave stepped into the same river twice. Slavery itself was continually changing, evolving, pushing forward, doubling back. In Generations of Captivity, Berlin once again makes the case—an important case—that historians of North American slavery have generally misspecified their subject because of an impoverished sense of geography and a telescopic sense of history.4 Regarding the former, Berlin argues in essence that one cannot understand North American slavery by focusing only on slavery in some parts of a broader whole. In his view, this problem is particularly serious for the study of North American slavery in the early modern period, because scholars have traditionally zeroed in on the Chesapeake and the Lower South and closely studied little else. Berlin correctly points out that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries slavery also existed in other parts of North America, including the North, Spanish Florida, and the Spanish/French-controlled lower Mississippi Valley. |
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