Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands

Abstract

This ambitious anthology asks whether we can more fully comprehend slavery by examining it across space, time, and disciplinary divides. Its contributors clearly benefited from the workshops that spawned the volume, sponsored by the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies. Instead of offering a loose collection of essays stitched together only by an introduction, the editors and authors have produced an innovative book that lives up to its title, drawing parallels between various regions and eras of North American history through the present. The volume demonstrates that Native American and Euro-American slave systems overlapped more than previously assumed. Both relied on violence and the removal of captives' prior identities. Both flourished because of “economic and social incentives,” and both expanded as part of extensive “cross-cultural trading networks” (pp. xx, xix). The book's contributors illuminate many instances where “indigenous and Euro-American slave systems evolved and innovated in response to each other,” validating the editors' decision to consider jointly institutions long studied separately (p. xxi).