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Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. By Ira Berlin. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 374. Cloth $29.95; paper $16.95.)
In 1998, Ira Berlin published Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. So much new research came out in the five years after that Berlin, one of the leading historians of slavery in the United States, felt that he needed to revisit and extend his earlier study. The result is Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves, a dense (though not densely written) account of the development of slavery in the parts of North America that became the United States. Berlin is after big game here, seeking to alter the course of a historiography whose terms were set almost fifty years ago by Kenneth Stampp, who wrote that slavery in the antebellum years was "rigid and static."
As Berlin demonstrates, though, slavery was an institution that was almost constantly in flux. He breaks its development down into four "generations": charter, plantation, revolutionary, and migration. This comes with the caveat that slavery developed differently in different regions and at different rates. Berlin then examines what kind of culture arises in slaveholding areas. Societies with slaves feature bondage but are not dominated by it. Slave societies, on the...