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Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. By Ira Berlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003; pp x + 374. $16.95 paper.
Ira Berlin's new book examines the nature and effects of North American slavery on persons of color.Not simply a history of slavery, Generations of Captivity is "the story of the making and remaking of slavery" with an emphasis on the slave (4). Berlin laments that, too often and for too long, scholars have treated slaves as standing outside history, having no definitive role in the world in which they lived. In contrast, Berlin contends that slaves and free persons of color were not socially and politically inert; rather, their history "was made not only by what was done to them but also by what they did for themselves" (4).
Berlin integrates a vast array of primary sources with recent monographs and scholarly articles to update and extend his earlier work, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998). Berlin divides this revised study chronologically and geographically. The four main chapters each investigate a "generation" of persons of color. The examination of each generation begins with the geographic region that most typifies that generation and continues by noting the differences of each region within that generation. Berlin's analysis reveals that contrary to the dominant thesis of North American slavery as uniform and continuous, slavery was complex and diverse, heterogeneous. The amount and nature of freedom, the level of autonomy, the position and status of families, the religious practices, and the options for manumission ebbed and flowed from generation to generation and from region to region. Although slavery was "originally imposed and maintained by violence," Berlin maintains that slaveowners and slaves continually "negotiated and then renegotiated" the terms...