The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies

In this brief work, which reads like an extended essay, historian Betty Wood analyzes the development of African slavery in the 17th century English North American colonies. Wood suggests that, although the early English colonists did not arrive with the intent to import West Africans as slaves, a combination of racial stereotypes formed as early as the 16th century and economic factors made this outcome likely. Slavery developed differently in each region of North America, and Wood addresses the similarities and differences in separate chapters on the Caribbean and Carolina colonies, the Chesapeake/Tidewater colonies of Virginia and Maryland, and the Puritan and Quaker colonies in New England and the Mid-Atlantic region. This would show more make a nice companion reading for David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, which is organized along the same regional lines but does not address the institutionalization of slavery in such depth. show less