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 thematic essays on comparative slavery, the economics of slavery, historical methodology in the field, slavery and the law, among others.

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 also posing new, often interdisciplinary, and theoretically informed questions concerning, 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, to identify just a few key developments.

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.

Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research in a particular subject area. Specially commissioned essays from leading figures in the discipline give critical examinations of the progress and direction of debates, as well as a foundation for future research. Oxford Handbooks provide scholars and graduate students with compelling new perspectives upon a wide range of subjects in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

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.
Mark M. Smith is Carolina Distinguished Professor of History at the University of South Carolina.