Slavery and the slave trade hold special and emotional overtones for many North Americans. Perhaps as a result, many hold a number of dubious stereotypical views on the subject. One common belief is that most slaves carried across the Atlantic landed in the territory that was to become the United States. Another is that slavery was common under the Roman Empire, then disappeared, replaced by serfdom, but that it reappeared somewhat mysteriously in the American South —though here confined to people of African descent. In either case, the problem comes from U. S. parochialism; most school history simply ignores slavery or the slave trade outside the United States.
As a corrective, Latin American and Caribbean slavery has received a good deal of attention in recent decades. The gap in time between Roman and Atlantic slavery has received less, though research has been building a new base. It was confined, however, to hundreds of relatively obscure articles in a variety of different languages—or to books dealing in detail with particular times and places. William Phillips’s work of synthesis is especially welcome because he has mastered this diverse body of material to present a broad picture of the Old World that led to the slave systems of colonial Latin America. While its special audience is Latin Americanist, it will also be useful as background for North American slave systems.
Phillips begins with the outlines of Roman slavery, showing that the institution changed markedly in the European Middle Ages but did not vanish in the Mediterranean world. The Roman latifundia disappeared and with them agricultural slavery, but slavery continued, principally in the cities and principally in domestic occupations. The slave trade also persisted, though from shifting sources, most of them beyond Christendom. The slavery that was to be most clearly typical for the tropical Americas emerged on Mediterranean sugar plantations, where agricultural slavery was reintroduced, and whence it spread to the Americas by way of the Atlantic islands.
Two other slave traditions lay in the background of American slavery: the Islamic slave system and the slave systems of sub-Saharan Africa. The first was important for its influence on Medieval European slavery, the second because it made slaves available for sale on the African coast. Roughly half the book deals with medieval European slavery. The second half takes up the movement of slavery out of Europe and Africa and on to the New World—with chapters on African slavery in Europe and the Atlantic islands, the early slave trade, and slavery in early colonial Latin America.
As might be expected from a medievalist like Phillips, the medieval chapters go most deeply into unfamiliar material and make the greatest new contribution. But other portions, that must have been unfamiliar to him at first, like those on Africa, show a thorough mastery of the literature. Factual errors are few, and the quality of the writing makes this a useful book to assign to undergraduates.
