AMERICAN SLAVERY

Book Report: American Slavery

Book Report: American Slavery

Introduction

This paper will be analyzing key facts of the book “American Slavery: 1619-1877” written by Peter Kolchin. This is a book which would recommend to all Americans. It deals with centuries of suffering by large numbers of people in a surprisingly dispassionate, almost clinical manner. One of the shameful aspects of American history, slavery deserves our attention both to correct an overly rosy view of American exceptionalism and to add insights to our understanding of the modern world.

The first version of the book was published in 1993, and then in 2003 edition, which includes an, Afterword. Mainly the readers of this book are neither a historian nor especially interested in slavery. People would found the main text relatively easy to read. For those with deeper interests, the book contains many references and a detailed bibliographic essay. The nature of American slavery had a geographical gradient, generally with more slaves, working under harsher conditions, in a longer lasting system the further south one went.

Central idea

The book accentuates that several agricultural systems; agriculture were crucial to the development of slavery and its organization tobacco in the mid Atlantic, rice in the coastal south and indigo, and cotton in the deep south. These systems were export oriented, albeit some of exports from southern colonies/states to northern colonies/states. Tobacco culture declined in the middle states as the lands became exhausted (and presumably as other sources of tobacco took European market share). Cotton culture increased, and the cotton plantation system moved west from its southern roots as the American frontier moved west.

While reading this book people would tend to glance at technology as it determines history. Thus, the development in ship technology must have braced up the Atlantic trade that brought slaves to the Americas and American crops to Europe. So too, the industrial revolution included the spinning and weaving technology that led to the British demand for cotton, and the complementary development of the cotton gin made the production of short staple cotton more efficient; together they made "king cotton" an export that was more valuable than all other U.S. exports by the 1850s.

For those people who are interested in modern development theory, the fate of the economies that depend on external export of a single, primary product such as tobacco, cotton or indigo seems familiar. It is not astonishing that the plantation culture benefited the plantation owners and not the plantation workers. Kolchin makes the important point that the plantation owners faced output markets but did not face a labor market, other than the cost of purchasing slaves (a cost that went up in the 19th century after the transatlantic slave trade was halted and the value of cotton went up).

In the period of antebellum, the evolution was made towards industrialization, additionally with social transformations the northern states. Slavery in the North had gone out with the Independence movement, and now the North was urbanizing, creating institutions including public ...