Shaping the New World : African slavery in the Americas, 1500-1888 /

A retired historian of colonial America at the University of British Columbia, Nellis seeks to introduce students to the origins, growth, and consolidation of African slavery in North America, the Caribbean, and Brazil. He examines the slave as a Euro-American "tool," but also stresses the "slaves' humanity." These ambitions are welcome, but go unfulfilled. Only one chapter deals with the slaves' humanity. The other chapters count the number of slaves traded, contrast colonial slave systems, compare plantation work regimes, plot political transformations, etc. Nellis skirts the massive 19th-century slave societies of the American South, Brazil, and Cuba compared to his prolonged analysis of colonial slave systems. Most important, recent research on the commercial role of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade, the social and cultural roots of the enslaved, slave ship revolts, slave culture on plantations and farms, gender difference for the enslaved, transnational routes of resistance, etc., receive only token acknowledgement. But these are the histories being written today. Newer work on west Africans' and west central Africans' historical agency in shaping the Atlantic Americas is replacing older historical works that ignored Africa and diaspora Africans. Such an introduction would better reflect the field and appeal more to students. Summing Up: Optional. Public and undergraduate collections. J. R. Kerr-Ritchie Howard University

Nellis (history, emeritus, Univ. of British Columbia; An Empire of Regions: A Brief History of Colonial British America) provides a well-crafted introduction to the origins, growth, and consolidation of African slavery in the Americas, emphasizing the wide-ranging impact that distinctive race-based slavery had on social, economic, and cultural developments. Until about 1850, more Africans entered the Americas than did Europeans. With a chronology, seven chapters, and a conclusion that cover the slave trade from its start by the Portuguese in the early 1400s until Brazil finally abolished slavery in 1888, this volume traces the flow of the approximately 12.5 million Africans enslaved. Nellis's comparative approach emphasizes differences and similarities in cultural, demographic, political, and social developments in slave societies-and societies holding slaves-in South America, North America, and the Caribbean. -VERDICT Nellis's work is an up-to-date, trenchant, readable primer recommended for general readers and students from the advanced high school level up.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.