Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

Abstract

Many Thousands Gone: First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. By Ira Berlin. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. x, 497. Paper, $16.95, ISBN: 0-674-00211-3; cloth, $29.95, ISBN 0-674-81092-9.) From the vantage point of the new millennium, W. E. B. Du Bois's famous prediction of 1903--that the color line would be the defining problem of the twentieth century--was all too painfully prescient. He might as well have extended his prediction into the twenty-first century. So thoroughly has racism remained America's bugaboo that scholars have felt a powerful moral urgency in their attempts to understand its tenacious hold on the present by explaining its origins in early America. One of the most enduring debates in colonial historiography regards the nature of the relationship between racism and slavery: how did they arise and which came first, or did they emerge entwined? With Many Thousands Gone, Ira Berlin has written the best overview to date of we know about the complex origins and development of African slavery in early America and its influence on the development of the idea of race. product of many years of research and writing, the book' s triumph lies in the author's admirable ability to absorb the massive body of literature on the subject and synthesize it with his own fresh interpretations. Berlin has capitalized better than most on the transformation in slavery studies since the early 1970s. Scholars of early America began to grasp the rich possibilities for pushing beyond the tired images of antebellum cotton plantations to study the emergence of slavery centuries earlier in a vastly different colonial world. Studies multiplied in every direction, including slave-labor economics, African origins and development of African-American cultures, master-slave relations, changes and differentiation in slavery over time and space, and, in a more recent cultural studies vein, the social and historical construction of racial identities. Berlin's book represents an amalgam of all these and more. book's prologue, Slavery, Making Race, is possibly the most elegant brief summary of the field now going. It conveys Berlin's sense that slavery probably had more to do with the creation of race than the other way around, though he emphasizes that as the two grew and mutated they inescapably transformed each other. Berlin strikes a balance in the recent literature by placing the at the center of the narrative and by showing not only was done to but also what they did for themselves (p. 2). author's finely crafted language reflects his sensitivity to nuances of the power struggles between master and slave: The minuet ... when played to the contrapuntal music of paternalism, was a constant, as master and continually renegotiated the small space allotted them. But the stylized movements--the staccato gyrations, the seductive feints, the swift withdrawals, and the hateful embraces--represented just one of many dances of domination and subordination, resistance and accommodation (p. 4). book's narrative plays out the minuet motif in three parts. In the first, Berlin shows that the dance of master and took place in a broad transatlantic and imperial context. He transcends traditional models that focus on British North America and demonstrates how the early North American Spanish, English, French, and Dutch colonies moved from being with slaves to slave societies (p. 10). first handful of Africans in these settlements, which the author calls the (p. 12), were generally Atlantic creoles (p. 17). They were often the mixed-race, multilingual offspring of European traders and African women from the West African coast. Though enslaved, members of the charter generations benefited from the relatively fluid social conditions in the colonies by gaining various legal and ecclesiastical protections, and, occasionally, earning freedom. …