Foundations of Slavery: African, Atlantic, and American

Foundations of Slavery: African, Atlantic, and American

Required:
 John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1998), Intro & Part I.
 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (1998), Part I, “The Charter Generations,” pp. 17-63.

To Think About ~ How does Thornton characterize relations between Africans and Europeans during the early development of the slave trade? How and why do these authors conceive of the Atlantic as a unit of analysis and how useful is that idea? How does Berlin define “Atlantic creoles”? Does this category help us re-think notions of slavery in the early modern period?