The practice of slavery has been common across a variety of cultures around the globe and throughout history. Despite the multiplicity of slavery's manifestations, many scholars have used a simple binary to categorize slave-holding groups as either 'genuine slave societies' or 'societies with slaves'. This dichotomy, as originally proposed by ancient historian Moses Finley, assumes that there were just five 'genuine slave societies' in all of human history: ancient Greece and Rome, and the colonial Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South. This book interrogates this bedrock of comparative slave studies and tests its worth. Assembling contributions from top specialists, it demonstrates that the catalogue of five must be expanded and that the model may need to be replaced with a more flexible system that emphasizes the notion of intensification. The issue is approached as a question, allowing for debate between the seventeen contributors about how best to conceptualize the comparative study of human bondage.

More than three decades after its initial publication, J. Mills Thornton's Politics and Power in a Slave Society remains the definitive study of political culture in antebellum Alabama. Controversial when it first appeared, the book argues against a view of prewar Alabama as an aristocratic society governed by a planter elite. Instead, Thornton claims that Alabama was an aggressively democratic state, and that this very egalitarianism set the stage for secession. White Alabamians had first-hand experiences with slavery, and these encounters warned them to guard against the imposition of economic or social reforms that might limit their equality. Playing upon their fears, the leaders of the southern rights movement warned that national consolidation presented the danger that fanatic northern reformers would force alien values upon Alabama and its residents. These threats gained traction when national reforms of the 1850s gave state government a more active role in the everyday life of Alabama citizens; and ambitious young politicians were able to carry the state into secession in 1861. Politics and Power in a Slave Society continues to inspire scholars by challenging one of the fundamental articles of the American creed: that democracy intrinsically produces good. Contrary to our conventional wisdom, slavery was not an un-American institution, but rather coexisted with and supported the democratic beliefs of white Alabama.

Challenging the generally accepted belief that the introduction of racial slavery to America was an unplanned consequence of a scarce labor market, Anthony Parent, Jr., contends that during a brief period spanning the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a small but powerful planter class, acting to further its emerging economic interests, intentionally brought racial slavery to Virginia. Parent bases his argument on three historical developments: the expropriation of Powhatan lands, the switch from indentured to slave labor, and the burgeoning tobacco trade. He argues that these were the result of calculated moves on the part of an emerging great planter class seeking to consolidate power through large landholdings and the labor to make them productive. To preserve their economic and social gains, this planter class inscribed racial slavery into law. The ensuing racial and class tensions led elite planters to mythologize their position as gentlemen of pastoral virtue immune to competition and corruption. To further this benevolent image, they implemented a plan to Christianize slaves and thereby render them submissive. According to Parent, by the 1720s the Virginia gentry projected a distinctive cultural ethos that buffered them from their uncertain hold on authority, threatened both by rising imperial control and by black resistance, which exploded in the Chesapeake Rebellion of 1730.

Book describes the brutal Black slave society and plantation system of Barbados and explains how this slave chattel model was perfected by the British and exported to Jamaica and South Carolina for profit. There is special emphasis on the role of the concept of white supremacy in shaping social structure and economic relations that allowed slavery to continue. The book concludes with information on how slavery was finally outlawed in Barbados, in spite of white resistance.

Because the institution of slavery has exerted such momentous force in shaping the socioeconomic and political history of the Caribbean, much of the region's historical writing has focused on slavery. Caribbean Slave Society and Economy brings together into one volume the main themes of the recent research on slavery, and explores the patterns and forms of socioeconomic life and activity that molded the region's heterogeneous slave societies.

In this text the author sets forth and then evaulates the images of slave women accumulated in published sources and folklore.

This is one of the first specialised treatments of an Anglophone Caribbean port-town by a contemporary historian. Having adeptly mined the existing archival data and statistics on Bridgetown, Pedro Welch shares with the reader these nuggets of information that contribute immensely to our understanding of the way slave societies functioned in the Caribbean. This book shows how life in the urban slave society departed significantly from that of the rural plantation. There is considerable evidence indicating that slaves and freed persons found and utilised 'room to manoeuvre options' in that urban context, which allowed some of them to amass small fortunes and landholdings, act relatively freely and independently and occasionally be acknowledged almost as the equal of their white counterparts. Several areas of urban social formation are analysed in the study. Demographic, trade and free coloured communities receive detailed treatment. Publication of this work is timely, coinciding as it does with the 375th anniversary of the founding of Bridgetown, Barbados