Generations of Captivity

Ira Berlin’s Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (2003) is an analytical work of historical research and synthesis that traces the development of American slavery from the 17th century to national Emancipation. Berlin compares the development and conditions of slavery across regions including the North (usually New England and the Mid-Atlantic states), the coastal South (or sections of it most relevant to the corresponding timeline), and the Southern Interior, particularly in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The regional focus illustrates the great diversity of experience in this history. Berlin’s central argument is that American slavery was contingent and heterogenous. Slaves continually negotiated their circumstances and maintained control over important aspects of their lives, most notably kinship relations, religious identities, and other markers of culture and community.

This central claim is a response to a theme that Berlin noticed in contemporary histories of slavery that treat the institution as static and homogenous across time and space. The intervention that Generations of Captivity makes in studies of slavery is therefore a corrective to a misinterpretation of a foundational American institution. Berlin illustrates how slavery developed from peripheral labor into an all-encompassing societal structure over the course of three centuries and in relation to transatlantic histories of the New World, Europe, and Africa.