Abstract: Berlin’s Two Concepts of Slavery Joyce E. Chaplin (bio) Ira Berlin. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. 512 pp. Figures, maps, tables, appendixes, notes, and index. $29.95. Thirty years ago, ambitious, doorstopper books on slavery concentrated on the antebellum era; today, they tend to focus on the colonial period. Ira Berlin’s Many Thousands Gone joins Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade (1997), Robin Blackburn’s, The Making of New World Slavery (1997), and Philip D. Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint (1998) in a recent spate of books about early slavery. These monographs take up the work pioneered by Winthrop Jordan and David Brion Davis to see how slavery and prejudice toward blacks were embedded in western European and then American culture. The shift away from the nineteenth century is evidence of the maturation of the field, in which origins of the peculiar institution and its global dimensions are of greater interest because they are still less understood than the forms of slavery which were dismantled during and after the Civil War. But this shift toward the early-modern period probably also represents a different generation’s examination of slavery. During the era of the civil rights movement, comprehension of the racism that had survived the Civil War seemed to support an ideal of the radical transformation of American society toward racial equality. Now, because that transformation has not entirely been achieved, scholars are looking more carefully at the early history of slavery, in order to understand why racial inequality may be so persistent. Berlin opens his book by addressing this concern: “Of late, it has become fashionable to declare that race is a social construction.” The problem, Berlin points out, is that this scholarly contention “has won few practical battles. Few people believe it; fewer act on it. The new understanding of race has changed behavior little if at all” (p. 1). Why have the scales not fallen from our eyes? To trace the tenacity of racism, Berlin’s examination of slavery’s genesis necessarily also has to explain the emergence of racism. He therefore traces two patterns: how slavery came to be equivalent with enslavement of Africans, and how freedom did not guarantee racial equality. Berlin’s goal is to demonstrate that, in early North America, slavery was a pervasive and [End Page 188] little questioned institution whose increasingly close association with concepts of race made it difficult to root out its legacy. Slaves (and free blacks) lived everywhere, from northern cities to Louisiana plantations. In contrast, criticism of slavery was scattered, amorphous, and took too many different forms to build toward any effective assault on the institution. Further, because slavery became so closely identified with African ancestry, race was significant not only as a way to justify the heritability of slavery, but also in the persistence of its legacy long past phases of emancipation that began in the north and then would—slowly and with violence—continue into the antebellum era. To make these points, Berlin crafts a deft synthesis of the many regional studies that have slowly been changing our understanding of slavery. The model for such works has been Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), which used analysis of one colony’s history of slavery to argue for the institution’s ironic presence in American history. Berlin adopts the central viewpoint of such studies, which emphasize that the “peculiar institution” of the antebellum era was indeed peculiar to that era. Berlin observes that “at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when this book concludes, the vast majority of black people, slave and free, did not reside in the blackbelt, grow cotton, or subscribe to Christianity” (p. 14). Slavery had a history, one that “can be best appreciated in terms of generations of captivity” that changed over time. There is no shortage of scholarly works since Morgan’s that have shown how this was the case; the number of monographs and essays on the topic has exploded over the past two decades. But these are works that take on one region (or...
Publication Year: 1999
Publication Date: 1999-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 1
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot