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The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry . By Ned and Constance Sublette. Chicago : Lawrence Hill Books , 2016. 752 pages. $35.00, hardback.
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United States and Canada
Slave breeding is the focus of this history of the United States from colonial times to the Civil War. The expansion of cotton cultivation and the closing of the international slave trade increased the demand for slaves in the Southwest and increased slave prices throughout the South. According to Ned and Constance Sublette, the authors of The American Slave Coast, slaveholders in the Chesapeake responded to these higher prices by breeding and selling slaves to traders for southern markets. "[P]rohibiting the African slave trade protected the market so that a new class of American traders could come forward, supplied with homegrown captives born into slavery on Virginia and Maryland farms. The conditions were right for a massive forced migration of enslaved Chesapeake laborers down South, and it did not have to be a one-time drain: a continuing domestic slave-breeding industry was now possible" (p. 362).
Despite its 700+ page length, The American Slave Coast does not include a comprehensive review of the literature on slave breeding. Many of...