Questions:

Assess the importance of violence in the transition to the plantation period of British American history.

“The most degraded period in African American history.” Discuss.

Was there such a thing as “the sugar revolution”?

“The rise of the slave colonies took place in and through economic, military and social competition.” (Blackburn). Discuss

To what extent can the origins of African slavery in the New World be attributed solely to European racial distaste for Africans?

Readings:

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: 1998), 93-141

B.W. Higman, “The Sugar Revolution,” Economic History Review 53 (2000), 213-36

Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery from the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 307-72