Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America.(Review)

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. By Ira Berlin. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. xii + 497 PP. Maps, illustrations, tables, notes and index. $29.95.

Nearly twenty years ago, in a highly influential article in the American Historical Review, Ira Berlin, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, suggested that too many scholars tend to examine the African experience in early America through the contextual lenses of the late antebellum South. Black life in North Atlantic colonies differed dramatically across space and time, he suggested, and not merely because Africans harvested crops other than cotton before 1800. Several authors of ingenious community studies heeded Berlin's warnings regarding a teleological view …