On Many Thousands Gone
Berlin, Ira. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000. pp. 512. Paperback.
I really love Ira Berlin’s studies of slavery, but the arguments in this book are effectively the same as in Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, except the last two “generations” are not included, you can see my review for that text .
Although the main arguments for the book are the same, Many Thousands Gone focuses a bit more on the impact of regions and types of labor in the formation of slavery in the United States. In the North, slavery was one form of labor among many, and slaves generally supplemented family duties. In the Chesapeake Bay, there were two major forms of labor: slavery and servanthood. Servants were paid laborers, sometimes indentured, but they worked alongside enslaved peoples. In the Carolina (and Florida) lowcountry, slavery was effectively the only form of labor and it was probably the most brutal. In the lower Mississippi, there were major questions about which forms of labor should be used, given that it did not immediately have a staple crop. However, with the increase of importance of cotton and sugar, slavery came to dominate the economy, more like the Carolina lowcountry than the Chesapeake or the North.
I’m a huge fan of Berlin’s work, but I feel like I may have wasted a bit of time reading this one, as his later work treads the same ground.