The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas

The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas offers penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World. With essays on colonial and antebellum America, Brazil, the Caribbean, the Indies, and South America, the Handbook has impressive geographic and temporal coverage. It also includes a generous range of thematic essays on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, historical methodology in the field, slavery and the law, for instance.

While obviously indebted to the foundational works of the 1960s and 1970s, current writing on the history of slavery and forms of unfree labor in the Americas has taken decidedly original, new, often ingenious turns. A younger generation of scholars has shown a healthy respect for that tradition while posing new, often interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed questions, considering, for example, the nature and definition of slave resistance in the Americas, evolving meanings of gender and race under slavery, the complicated nature of class formation in unfree societies, the elaboration of proslavery and antislavery ideologies, the origins and subsequent elaboration of race-based slavery, and mechanisms of emancipation.

Written by an international team including some of the field's most eminent historians and the most innovative younger scholars working today,The Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas seeks to explain the enduring importance of the earlier historiography, identify current trends and developments, and offer suggestive but informed commentary on future developments in the field for a global scholarly audience.

Robert L. Paquette is Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College and co-founder of the Alexander Hamilton Institute for the Study of Western Civilization in Clinton, New York. He has published extensively on the history of slavery and his Sugar is Made with Blood won the Elsa Goveia Prize given by the Association of Caribbean Historians for the best book in Caribbean history.

Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. He is author or editor of a dozen books, includingMastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South, winner of the Organization of American Historians' Avery O. Craven Award and South Carolina Historical Society's Book of the Year in 1997. He is the current President of the Historical Society.