Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) and coeditor (with Sean Hawkins) of Black Experience and the Empire: The Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). He would like to acknowledge in particular the assistance of David Brion Davis, who generously sent him two early chapters from his forthcoming manuscript, "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of New World Slavery."

Explanation:

Answer:

Slavery is often termed "the peculiar institution," but it was hardly peculiar to the United States. Almost every society in the history of the world has experienced slavery at one time or another. The aborigines of Australia are about the only group that has so far not revealed a past mired in slavery—and perhaps the omission has more to do with the paucity of the evidence than anything else. To explore American slavery in its full international context, then, is essentially to tell the history of the globe. That task is not possible in the available space, so this essay will explore some key antecedents of slavery in North America and attempt to show what is distinctive or unusual about its development. The aim is to strike a balance between identifying continuities in the institution of slavery over time while also locating significant changes. The trick is to suggest preconditions, anticipations, and connections without implying that they were necessarily determinations (1).

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