Globalization, creolization, and the not-so-peculiar institution.

IT HAS BECOME A CLICHE TO PROCLAIM THE NEED TO INTERNATIONALIZE the study of the United States. Well-funded conferences, special issues of prestigious journals, and countless panels at professional meetings have been devoted to discussions of how to overcome the self-perceived provincialism of American historians. I have joined in the parade of historians who have participated in these events. Like most academic fashions, this one is a response, at least in large part, to perceived shifts in the world in which we live--in this case to demographic, political, cultural, and economic transformations that come together under the rubric of globalization. Also like most academic fads, this one has inspired some scholars to do wonderful work, explicating, for example, the way a single crop and its markets can link people's fates across regions, nations, and continents or the way that innovations in journalistic practices helped create a "smaller" world. (1) This trend has also inspired its share of flashy but superficial scholarship that disguises old ideas by giving them new labels.

Historians of slavery and historians of colonial British America can, perhaps, be forgiven for wondering what the globalizing fuss is all about. Through no particular virtues or insights of their own, they have long had to address many questions through transnational approaches. That is in part because scholars of colonial British America are inherently pulled into two distinct national historiographies--that of Great Britain and that of the United States. Scholars of slavery have found themselves in an analogous position as they have attempted to conceptualize the relationships between Old World heritages and New World realities. Atlantic approaches to the history of slavery in the Americas reach back to W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Melville J. Herskovits, and Eric Williams, so it is hardly surprising that the first formal program in Atlantic history and culture at an American university emerged during the 1970s out of the collaboration of historical anthropologists of Afro-Caribbean experiences and historians of the early modern societies that bordered the Atlantic. (2) By the 1970s, then, historians of slavery in colonial British America were being pushed by intellectual traditions and institutional forces to understand the institution of slavery and the experiences of those victimized by it in transnational contexts that included Africa, Europe, and non-English speaking societies in the Americas. If, as a result, the rage for globalizing perspectives did not hit them with the same force that it hit other practitioners of U.S. history, it has nonetheless helped foster important, though subtler, shifts in the field.

As it happens, this can be traced with unusual chronological precision, because of a coincidence in timing. Almost ten years ago Philip D. Morgan published Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and Ira Berlin published Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Each book represents the culmination of over twenty years of work by one of the most respected historians of American slavery. Both are constructed around questions rooted in the historiography of the United States, and both build on the preceding decade's enormous flowering of local studies of slavery in colonial North America. Both books work within the main currents of the field that their authors had helped to shape by taking Atlantic approaches to colonial slavery. Together they all but swept the major professional book prizes in American history in 1998, and together they can be understood to have brought to fruition a generation of scholarship on slavery in colonial North America. (3)

Many Thousands Gone is a synthetic work that seeks to bring interpretive order to the mass of information about colonial slavery that had accumulated from the mid-1970s--when books by Peter H. Wood and Gerald W. Mullin initiated a flood of new scholarship--through the mid-1990s. (4) Berlin follows convention by taking a regional approach to early American history and signals his commitment to the national historiography of the United States by incorporating the history of the lower Mississippi Valley while excluding that of the British Caribbean. Atlanticist that he is, Berlin does not by any means ignore transnational questions--his portrayal of African-born "Atlantic creoles" may well be the single most influential part of this important book, and regional variations in the Atlantic slave trade play a fundamental role in his analysis of the different patterns of development that characterized slavery in the North, the Chesapeake, the lower South, and the lower Mississippi. Nonetheless, Berlin's decision to exclude the British Caribbean from Many Thousands Gone, a decision that is clearly and sensibly rooted in the historiography of the United States, effectively ignores the economic engine that drove the slave trade and thus did so much to shape slavery in British North America. Discussing those four peripheries without much reference to their Caribbean center--the index lists nine pages on which the West Indies are mentioned, with separate listings of eight pages for Barbados and two for Jamaica--may have predetermined the uneven processes of cultural change that Berlin finds characteristic of the regions that he surveys. This matters little for the project as Berlin has defined it: rather than tracing the contours of British colonial slavery, Many Thousands Gone lays the groundwork for the emergence of antebellum slavery in a divided union, a story that Berlin proceeded to tell in his next book, Generations of Captivity. (5)

Slave Counterpoint is a very different book, one that employs exhaustive archival research to reconstruct first the material conditions of life and then the worldviews of enslaved blacks living in the colonial Chesapeake and South Carolina. It too is a thoroughly Atlantic book that explores in great detail Africa's links to both Virginia and South Carolina, using a comparative framework that allows for analytically precise discussions of the nature and variety of cultural transmission across the ocean, of the different patterns of cultural adaptation, and of the conditions that shaped them. The empirical depth that informs Slave Counterpoint can be humbling. Notwithstanding the differences between these books--one synthetic, the other archival; one a broad comparison of four regional cultures, the other a deep analysis of two--both start from the historiography of the United States. Morgan, in fact, starts more specifically with southern history, noting in the introduction: "Too often in history one South has served as proxy for many Souths." (6) Slave Counterpoint, together with Many Thousands Gone, should make it unacceptable for future historians to make that mistake. Together they exemplify the ways that historians of early American slavery worked within national historiographies to engage in transnational history before globalization took center stage.

In the years following the appearance of these two books, the best scholarship on colonial slavery has built upon this body of work while turning increasingly away from the questions rooted in the national historiography of the United States that were so important to the earlier studies. It has done so in part because of the powerful effect of one of the most important collaborative scholarly projects in recent memory. In 1999 a team of historians led by David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt, David Richardson, and Herbert S. Klein and funded by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University completed the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, making available to scholars throughout the world a database incorporating surviving evidence from roughly two-thirds of the known voyages by ships engaged in the four-centuries-long Atlantic slave trade. The following year David Eltis published The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas, a powerful interpretation of the data presented in the database. (7) These works established the centrality of Brazil and the Caribbean and of sugar as a crop to the Atlantic economy of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, underscoring the marginality of North American colonial slavery when viewed from a broader perspective. Much of the most interesting work done in the last five years has begun to build either on the wealth of evidence made available through the database or on insights offered by Eltis, or on both, producing an increasingly transnational history of eighteenth-century slavery. That trend shows no signs of abating.

There is some danger, however, in attributing too much causal influence to the work of Eltis and his collaborators. One effect of the database was to reveal the remarkable accuracy of Philip D. Curtin's much earlier demographic estimates in The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, so the stature of Brazil and the Caribbean at the American center of the trade did not come as a surprise. (8) Similarly, colonial economic historians led by John J. McCusker had long since demonstrated the degree to which the economies of Britain's mainland colonies had developed in part as junior partners to the sugar islands. (9) Several social histories of the British Caribbean, including Richard S. Dunn's Sugar and Slaves, Michael Craton's Testing the Chains, and David Barry Gaspar's Bondmen and Rebels, were integral to conventional understandings of British America from the time of their publication in the 1970s and 1980s. (10) In fact, long before finishing Slave Counterpoint, Morgan had turned much of his attention toward the British Caribbean, especially toward Jamaica, in response to that island's dominant position within both the African diaspora and Great Britain's eighteenth-century colonial economy. Nonetheless, the appearance of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database almost surely accelerated and unquestionably informed the trend toward the Caribbean and toward transnational questions within studies of colonial slavery.

Those trends take different forms. April Lee Hatfield's Atlantic Virginia is clearly inspired by long-standing perceptions of the importance of the Atlantic world economy to Britain's engagement with the Americas, perceptions that Hatfield expands upon to demonstrate that the rise of slavery within Virginia was much less surprising and problematic than earlier historians, especially those engaged in debates over the origins of American racism, had suggested. Linking the emergence of slavery in the Chesapeake to the development of the institution in other parts of the Americas, especially Barbados, rather than solely to changes within Virginia, creates a fresh perspective on a topic that had been examined by some of the most prominent American historians of the previous generation. (11) Rhys Isaac, writing about Virginia at the end of the colonial era in Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, paints a picture of slavery in Britain's most important mainland colony that is equally--but differently--tied to Atlantic forces. The black people living on Landon Carter's plantations during the 1760s and 1770s found themselves caught up in forces that extended far beyond the confines of Carter's possessions or of Virginia's political jurisdiction. (12) Even on the small kingdom of a seemingly isolated Virginia plantation, the ideological currents of the Atlantic world swept blacks and whites alike into a changing world. Though Isaac and Hatfield's books could hardly be more different, both show the ways that increasing attention to international contexts is enlivening even specifically regional studies of slavery in colonial North America.

The zeal for global approaches has also begun to stimulate what promises to be a growing wave of local and regional (or island-wide) studies of slavery in the colonial West Indies, especially in Jamaica. Notwithstanding the important books cited earlier, the geopolitical marginalization of the Caribbean during the twentieth century has meant that the sugar islands have received much less scholarly attention than their importance to the colonial world merits. Two excellent new books, one recently published and the other forthcoming, can be seen as opening salvos in the barrage of studies that are needed to bring knowledge of Britain's most important eighteenth-century slave societies into line with that of mainland colonies. In Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World, Trevor Burnard uses the infamous diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican overseer and slave owner, to portray in brutal detail how the island became a hell on earth for its black majority and a demonic haven for white men. Burnard portrays Thistlewood as a successful overseer and as a marginal participant in "enlightened" culture, but one whose success rested upon his willingness and ability to use unspeakable cruelty to control the ethnically diverse black laborers under his direction. Thistlewood's domain was a cattle estate rather than a sugar plantation, so Burnard's analysis has the virtues and raises the questions about representativeness that are inherent in local studies. (13) Vincent Brown's forthcoming book examines what it meant for black and white residents of Jamaica to live in the constant presence of death. This innovative examination of the cultures of black and white Jamaicans necessarily lacks the fine-grained local context that so enriches Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, offering in its place a broad approach to the ways Jamaicans made sense of the staggering mortality that was one of the defining qualities of life on a sugar island. (14) Notwithstanding these two new books, Jamaica and more generally the eighteenth-century Caribbean remain a badly understudied region of colonial British America. Given the information about the Atlantic slave trade that is newly available in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, it promises to be one of the most fruitful fields in the study of early America and of slavery for the foreseeable future.

Another path toward an increasingly international approach to early American slavery has resulted from historians attending much more closely to the connections among African and creole victims of the slave trade living in different American societies. This strain of scholarship has important recent antecedents in Julius Sherrard Scott III's influential 1986 dissertation on black responses to the Haitian Revolution throughout the Americas, in W. Jeffrey Bolster's award-winning book on black mariners in the age of sail, and in Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood's study of black preachers' roles in the spread of Christianity among enslaved people throughout the southern United States and the Caribbean. (15) The connections among blacks in different parts of the Atlantic world have informed others, including Randy J. Sparks, Cassandra Pybus, and Simon Schama, who have uncovered remarkable stories of enslaved and freed black people traveling and engaging in politics (or with political actors) in American, European, and African societies. Their books have enriched our understanding of the varieties of ways that blacks experienced the black Atlantic, and they have done so in large part by escaping some of the limitations created by defining historical questions in terms shaped by national historiographies. (16) Because the experiences of those victimized by slavery were influenced but not determined by political and imperial boundaries, historians of colonial slavery have increasingly crossed those lines. Jon F. Sensbach, who previously studied the nature of slavery in a Moravian community in North Carolina, has followed the evangelical path of the Moravian Church to the West Indies to uncover the fascinating story of a freed black evangelist who moved from a Danish island in the Caribbean to Europe and then to Africa. (17) Jane Landers, a Latin American historian, has produced a body of writing about blacks in Spanish colonial Florida that has been of great importance to the historiography of slavery in colonial British America. (18) Cumulatively, this work has established that a black Atlantic had real existence in many people's daily lives in the eighteenth century and that the common and accurate picture of most victims of the slave trade living out their lives on sugar, rice, and tobacco plantations must be set beside the seemingly contradictory reality of black sailors, artisans, and preachers spreading political and religious ideas as they moved from place to place. Vague generalizations about news traveling along the slaves' grapevine are giving way to more precise understandings of the ways that news and rumor moved through African America.

This picture of a black Atlantic of shared ideas and a developing shared protoracial identity sits in creative tension with some interpretations of early American slave cultures offered by historians of Africa. Using their expertise in the cultures and histories of the Old World, scholars like John K. Thornton, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Michael A. Gomez have argued that ethnic cultures rooted on the continent of Africa--Akan, Igbo, Kongo, and others--retained cohesive meaning in the Americas throughout the eighteenth century. Creolization--the process through which new African American cultures emerged in the New World--occurred much more gradually, these scholars argue, than historians trained primarily in American and European history have recognized. (19) Stephanie E. Smallwood has recently engaged this debate with a carefully designed study that traces blacks who were taken out of the Gold Coast in present-day Ghana by the Royal Africa Company and sold into Barbados, Jamaica, or Virginia. Smallwood's focus on a specific group of forced immigrants allows her to reconstruct the changing experiences of those caught up in the Atlantic trade, an exercise that helps bridge the claims of Africanist and Americanist historians. Smallwood traces the different challenges that slaves sold out of the Gold Coast had to surmount at different points during the Middle Passage, showing how they adapted their Old World cultures to meet unexpected needs. In the process they necessarily forged new cultures, not because they left the old ones behind but because the situations that they confronted--in the slave pens in Africa, on slavers traveling across the Atlantic, in slave markets in America, and on the plantations where most of them lived out their lives--were unprecedented. The Gold Coast victims of the trade responded to these new challenges by drawing on those aspects of their past lives that could help them make sense of what they were experiencing and by using those cultural resources to adapt to their new worlds. (20)

All of the studies discussed thus far have responded to the challenge of internationalizing the study of slavery by working within a framework indebted to Atlantic history. The last decade has witnessed the rise of a different and equally transnational approach to American colonial history, one that highlights connections in and across the Americas. (21) Historians of Native Americans have, for obvious reasons, been more drawn to continental approaches than have historians of African slavery, but the two bodies of scholarship are not distinct, in part because Africans were not the only group enslaved in early America. Alan Gallay's The Indian Slave Trade looks at the patterns of diplomacy, warfare, and commerce among English and Scottish settlers in South Carolina, on the one hand, and a wide array of native peoples, on the other, during the first decades of the eighteenth century, showing that South Carolina's engagement with slavery extended beyond buying, selling, and working Africans. (22) James F. Brooks extends the study of colonial slavery into a very different context by reconstructing a slave system based on kinship and exchange that linked the southwestern settlements centered on present-day New Mexico with both denser European settlements to the south and commercial networks of Native American peoples that stretched northward to Canada. (23) Both books embrace the transnational and cross-cultural spirit of so much of the new work on slavery, while focusing attention less on transoceanic connections than on the diplomatic and military ties that bound the peoples of the American continent to one another, sometimes in amity, often in warfare, and almost always through trade. These studies of Indian slavery reinforce two themes that have become increasingly important to the rest of the literature on colonial slavery. First, especially during the eighteenth century, slavery was an extremely malleable institution, changing its form to fit different circumstances. Second, this adaptability helped make the institution all but ubiquitous in the Americas.

That very omnipresence has meant that slavery in colonial British North America has always had a complicated place in the field of southern history, and the increasing appeal of transnational approaches has emphasized the awkward fit. The subdiscipline of southern history grew out of the regional divisions that fueled the American Civil War, and although different generations of historians have explained southern distinctiveness and the nationalism that it spawned in different ways, the presence of the "peculiar institution" in the antebellum South and its absence in the North have stood, at the very least, as unspoken markers of the boundaries of southern history. Not all self-styled southern historians have accepted this, but even those who have explained southern nationalism and the resulting Civil War as the handiwork of a blundering generation of statesmen or as the product of specific European ethnic cultural heritages have written within a framework that assumed that the South's dependence on racial slavery had to be addressed before other interpretations could become convincing.

British America before the Revolution has never fit this paradigm: historians have long known that prior to 1776, chattel slavery existed in each of the thirteen colonies, as well as in native, Franco-, Luso-, and Spanish America. There was nothing peculiar about the institution or about the embrace of it by colonies on the Chesapeake and in the Deep South. (24) When viewed from the perspective of the Civil War, one could certainly discern the roots of social, economic, and cultural differences between North and South in the patterns of thought and development that characterized Puritan New England or the middle colonies on the one hand, and the Chesapeake or lower South on the other, and many scholars did that. Historians of early America have long argued, however, that viewing the colonial period through the lens of the Revolution introduces anachronistic distortions, so there is understandable resistance to organizing the interpretation of colonial society around sectional splits that were far off in the future. (25)

If, however, scholarship dealing with colonial North American slavery has long had an uneasy relationship to the central questions that have animated southern history, it is worth asking what the reorientation of scholarship on early slavery away from national explanations and perspectives offers southern history. To some extent, the change in viewpoint does little more than offer a new angle on things we have long known. The more we learn about slavery in eighteenth-century New York, Philadelphia, and Santa Fe, the more obvious it becomes that while one can certainly speak of southern colonies in that era, there was no South. That, however, is hardly a novel realization.

Thankfully history has not followed some of the other disciplines in the humanities by making novelty the sole determinant of value, and there is much to be said for work that offers new perspectives on old questions, even if it does not fundamentally alter the answers. That said, it does seem that the greatest promise of increasingly transnational and transoceanic approaches to colonial slavery lies in the future. As noted earlier, one of the central questions faced by historians of American slavery has long been how to conceptualize the relationship between the Old World cultures of the peoples of Africa and the New World cultures of the enslaved in the Americas. Debates about this question underwent a fundamental shift during the 1970s in the wake of an influential paper by the anthropologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price. Mintz and Price began by reviewing the famous debate between E. Franklin Frazier and Melville J. Herskovits over whether victims of the Middle Passage were stripped of the cultures of their homelands or whether they transported those cultures unchanged and reconstituted them in the Americas; the two anthropologists then turned to (among other topics) linguistics and the study of creole languages for a model of slave cultures that were dynamic creations of peoples of different but related cultures as they sought to surmount the challenges of the New World. This, according to Mintz and Price, was the process through which Africans became African Americans. (26)

To say that Mintz and Price permanently shifted the debate is not to say that they ended it. The central argument of Berlin's Many Thousands Gone is that the history of black people in colonial North America was not a straightforward and unidirectional story of Africans becoming African Americans. Africanists, as noted earlier, have mounted a more fundamental attack on creolizationists, arguing that they have overstated the effects of African cultural diversity and ignored evidence of the reconstitution of African ethnic cultures in the New World.

To some degree the debate has stalled at this impasse, but not without having made a few things abundantly clear. The patterns of cultural development experienced by eighteenth-century black slaves--whether they lived in New York City, on tobacco plantations in the Virginia Tidewater, in Lowcountry rice parishes, or on Jamaican sugar plantations--were shaped by interrelated events throughout the Atlantic world, from the shifting tides of peace and war in Africa to demographic trends and political events in Europe to booms and busts throughout different American societies. This realization can be particularly daunting when trying to write broad histories of enslaved people, for no one has, or is likely to acquire, the range and depth of knowledge of all of these societies--each of them internally complex and diverse--seemingly required in order to formulate a general interpretation of the development of slave cultures in the Americas. (27)

As we learn more about the startling diversity that characterized eighteenth-century slavery, it seems increasingly likely that attempting such a broad, general interpretation of the culture of the enslaved would be a fool's errand, even if one could acquire the knowledge necessary to attempt it. A more promising effort might be for historians of slavery in colonial British America to embrace the transnational spirit of recent work, but to turn that spirit toward local studies of slavery in the Caribbean. Given that we may now know more about the Atlantic slave trade than about any comparable human migration, scholars should be able to make much more precise, if still rough, estimates of the ethnic compositions of slave populations in different Caribbean localities. Using that knowledge, they might well be able to develop empirically richer interpretations of the processes of cultural transmission and change through which the slave cultures of the Americas developed. By redirecting attention to the ways that the specific conditions faced by victims of slavery influenced the nature of cultural persistence and the rate at which creole cultures emerged, such work might begin to push scholars beyond the deadlock between those who highlight cultural change and those who foreground cultural persistence. Rather than a single, overarching, and almost certainly misleading narrative of the rise of creole American cultures, we are likely to see a much messier picture in which different African peoples came together in different settings to develop a range of cultural responses to New World slavery. Just as Caribbean histories stimulated Mintz and Price to formulate a theory that transformed approaches to North American slave cultures, so these new Caribbean histories seem likely to encourage clearer conceptions of the relationships among North American slavery and the cultures of Africa.

(1) Peter A. Coclanis, "Distant Thunder: The Creation of a World Market in Rice and the Transformations It Wrought," American Historical Review, 98 (October 1993), 1050-78; John J. McCusker, "The Demise of Distance: The Business Press and the Origins of the Information Revolution in the Early Modern Atlantic World," ibid., 110 (April 2005), 295-321.

(2) The Program in Atlantic History, Culture, and Society at Johns Hopkins University coalesced around the anthropologists Sidney W. Mintz and Richard and Sally Price and the historians Jack P. Greene, Philip D. Curtin, Franklin W. Knight, and A. J. R. Russell-Wood.

(3) Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, 1998); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

(4) Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974); Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York, 1972).

(5) Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 490, 493, 497; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), esp. chap. 4 and epilogue.

(6) Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, xvii.

(7) David Eltis et al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (Cambridge, Eng., 1999); David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge, Eng., 2000).

(8) Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, Wisc., 1969).

(9) McCusker and Russell R. Menard synthesize this material in The Economy of British America, 1607-1789 (Chapel Hill, 1985), esp. chap. 7.

(10) Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill, 1972); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, 1982); David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua, with Implications for Colonial British America (Baltimore, 1985).

(11) April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 2004).

(12) Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York, 2004). For an extended discussion of this book and the historiography of Virginia, see my "Rhys Isaac and History's Uneasy Kingdom: A Review Essay," Journal of Southern History, 72 (May 2006), 429-42.

(13) Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, 2004).

(14) Vincent Brown, The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming, 2008).

(15) Julius Sherrard Scott III, "The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution" (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1986); W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass., 1997); Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion." African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, 1998).

(16) Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Cambridge, Mass., 2004); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (London, 2005). Schama's book is an exception in that it is deeply embedded in the national historiography of Great Britain.

(17) Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

(18) Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana, 1999).

(19) See especially Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998); Paul E. Lovejoy, "Identifying Enslaved Africans in the African Diaspora," in Lovejoy, ed., Identity in the Shadow of Slavery (London, 2000), 1-29; and John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1480-1800 (1992; 2nd ed., Cambridge, Eng., 1998). See Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links (Chapel Hill, 2005), for similar interpretive claims from a prominent scholar trained as a historian of the Americas. Philip D. Morgan made an early critique of this line of interpretation in "The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments," in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Routes to Slavery: Direction, Ethnicity, and Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave Trade (London, 1997), 122-45.

(20) Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, Mass., 2007).

(21) Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001).

(22) Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, 2002).

(23) James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002).

(24) Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860 (Ithaca, 1998); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore, 2003); Thelma Wills Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History. of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City (New York, 2004); Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York, 2005); and Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Chicago, 2003) have explored slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

(25) For an analysis that points out some of these dangers, see Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000).

(26) Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (rev. ed., Boston, 1992). The original paper was published as Mintz and Price, An Anthropological Approach to the Afro-American Past: A Caribbean Perspective (Philadelphia, 1976).

(27) For the two closest approximations that we have to syntheses based on such encyclopedic knowledge, see Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (London, 1997); and David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York, 2006). Even Blackburn and Davis are stronger, however, on the histories of European and American societies than on the histories of African ones, and though both deal with the creolization question, neither focuses on it.

MR. SIDBURY is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.