Generations of Captivity and Slavery History Essay
Excerpted from Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves by Ira Berlin, now available from Harvard University Press. This article is a companion to The History of American. Ira Berlin traces the history of African-American slavery in the United States from its beginnings in the seventeenth century to its fiery demise nearly three hundred years later. Most Americans, black and white, have a unique view of slavery, a view that was established in the mid-nineteenth century when most American slaves grew and lived in cotton. While many may believe that slavery ended with the Emancipation Proclamation, its impact on society is far-reaching and continues to influence various aspects of our lives. This essay examines the long-lasting effects of slavery on modern society, focusing on economic inequality, systemic inequality. what the system of confinement was like. Here, however, Berlin offers an important reinterpretation in which slaves and their owners continually renegotiated the terms of captivity. Slavery was thus made and remade by successive generations of Africans and African Americans who lived through settlement and adaptation, plantation life, economic transformations, revolution, coercion. A transhistorical overview of this subject can be found in Gwyn, Campbell, “Slavery and the Trans -Indian Ocean World Slave Trade”, in Prabha Ray, Himanshu and Alpers, Edward A. eds. Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World Oxford, 2007, pp. 286 - 305. Campbell's more recent article “East,