Book Review

Canada and the United States

Despite the many generalizations made about "slavery in America," as opposed, say, to slavery in Latin America or in ancient Greece or Rome, the "peculiar institution" was neither peculiar, static, nor in any way uniform. Although the past forty-odd years have brought us shelves of excellent books on North American slavery, historians have tended to concentrate on the last thirty-five years of the institution while giving little attention to racial slavery in the North, Canada, Spanish Florida, and French and Spanish Louisiana. Even more misleading, as Ira Berlin pointed out in a groundbreaking article nearly twenty years ago, the standard accounts of American slavery have tended to ignore the revolutionary changes that kept shaping and reshaping the institution during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even prior to the massive movement of slave labor from the eastern coast and piedmont to the Black Belt, Louisiana, and Texas (see "Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Slavery on British Mainland North America," AHR 85:1 [1980]: 44–78). In this book, Berlin has produced a masterly synthesis of the vast body of research hundreds of scholars have done on the first two centuries of slavery in British, French, and Spanish North America, a portrait of highly fortuitous change that should leave a telltale stamp on all future treatments of New World slavery.

1

In the Chesapeake colonies, as in the North and even in South Carolina for a much shorter period, few of the early generations of slaves came directly from Africa. Berlin labels these "charter" generations "Atlantic creoles," since they sailed in from the West Indies or various parts of the Atlantic littoral and often bore Hispanic or mixed names like Juan Rodrigues or Domingo Mathews (in contrast to later eighteenth-century comic, animal-like names like Cato, Jumper, or Hercules). The Atlantic creole slaves were often multilingual, cosmopolitan, and Christian. Some of them, like the lançados who for centuries had served as merchants and intermediaries along the West African coast, were of mixed African and European ancestry.

. . .