The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas offers authoritative articles on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World. With articles on colonial and antebellum America, Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indies, and South America, this book has impressive geographic and temporal coverage. It also includes a generous range of thematic articles on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, and historical methodology in the field, slavery, and the law, for instance. While obviously indebted to the foundational works of the 1960s and 1970s, current writing on the history of slavery and forms of un-free labour in the Americas has taken decidedly original, new, often ingenious turns. A younger generation of scholars has shown a healthy respect for that tradition while posing new, often interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed questions, considering, for example, the nature and definition of slave resistance in the Americas, evolving meanings of gender and race under slavery, the complicated nature of class formation in un-free societies, the elaboration of proslavery and antislavery ideologies, the origins and subsequent elaboration of race-based slavery, and mechanisms of emancipation.