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The great majority of Walvin's writings on slavery have focussed on the institutions and cultures of slave societies in English-speaking America. His latest book is no exception to this pattern.

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It is also fair to say that, since he co-authored with Michael Craton in the late s a study of Jamaica's Worthy Park plantation, Walvin's writings have tended to take a more panoramic view as he has surveyed the growth and evolution of slave systems. Seeking to 'to pick a path through the scholarly thickets' p. Walvin makes no pretense to quantitative skills. Indeed, at times, he is positively suspicious of quantification since he believes that in some cases debates over data can lead historian to become detached from the 'social realities' of the historical events or situations that they are seeking to analyse.

Questioning Slavery

Thus in one of his more openly critical passages in Questioning Slavery , he reflects on the way that historians have discussed the fertility rate of enslaved women and suggests that is so often historical debate has taken the form of a discussion about data, which is utterly remote from the women concerned' and then goes on to remind us that 'a new generation of mainly female historians' is now seeking 'to redirect our attention back to the slaves' p. The lives of the slaves, especially their resilience in the face of a brutal institution, and the depths to which white owners and their overseers could on occasion sink in their treatment of them, have been and remain consistent themes in Walvin's work.

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James Walvin needs no introduction to students of slavery since, over the last thirty years, he has been one of the most prolific writers on the history of American. Questioning Slavery [James Walvin] on bahana-line.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. For the best part of three centuries the material well-being of the .

As such, his writings on slavery offer an important counterweight to those, myself included, who have tended to invoke economic theory and to marshall large amounts of quantitative evidence in pursuing the study of the 'peculiar institution' and the traffic in Africans that sustained it. As co-editor for over a decade of the journal Slavery and Abolition , Walvin has witnessed at close quarters much of the recent research on slavery in the Americas.

One of his skills lies in revealing to a non-specialist audience the directions of current trends in research in the field of slavery. With the modern emphasis on detailed research monographs and articles in academic journals, works of synthesis have tended to enjoy a lower status within academia.

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Yasmin marked it as to-read Dec 10, Preview — Questioning Slavery by James Walvin. Many products and services offer Lexile measures for their books and reading materials. Hast marked it as to-read Jun 17, James Walvin needs no introduction to students of slavery since, over the last thirty years, he has been one of the most prolific writers on the history of American slavery among the academic fraternity on both sides of the Atlantic. Please note that the Lexile measures for a small population of books have been recently updated.

They do, however, provide a very valuable service in introducing students, undergraduate or graduate, to what may be major areas of historical research. Questioning Slavery is intended primarily as an introductory text, offering its readers not a comprehsensive history of slavery but a review of the directions in which slavery studies have been and are heading, and with the emphasis, in characteristic Walvin fashion, on the human dimensions of the subject, especially the social costs of slavery and the slave traffic as well as the efforts of slaves to create their own identities.

As Walvin admits, trying to make sense of 'a generation's scholarship' involves selectivity and 'a degree of artificial ordering' of materials p.

His purpose is to confront some of the main questions or problems that have attracted the attention of scholars and to do so in a critical fashion. Seen in these terms, the book may be judged to be a qualified success. Appropriately, Walvin begins Questioning Slavery by charting the expansion of slave-based plantation production from the Mediterranean and Atlantic islands to, successively, Brazil, the West Indies and mainland North America and by asking the basic question why slavery became so widespread in the Americas and so fundamental to the development of the Atlantic world between and He then goes on briefly to explore the expansion of the transatlantic slave trade and its impact on Africa before turning at greater length to those aspects of slave societies in the Americas with which his own work has become most closely identified, namely, the structure and operation of plantation regimes, the public and private lives of the slaves, and the rise of abolitionist movements in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Although he looks briefly at slavery in Brazil, which had the longest exposure to imports of enslaved labour from Africa and has been the subject of some recent outstanding studies, Walvin keeps his focus firmly directed to the English-speaking islands and mainland North America.

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In this respect, his book stands in contrast to some other, much longer, recent syntheses of the literature on transatlantic slavery, notably that of Robin Blackburn The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern , Verso, which places slavery in English-speaking America in the context of the slave systems of other European colonial powers. Walvin's answer to the basic question of why slavery migrated from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic islands to the Americas leans heavily on economic forces.

In particular, he emphasises high land to labour ratios in the colonies conquered by the European powers and the relative costs of coerced and free labour. These are not new arguments, but it is useful to non-specialists have them presented in such an accessible way as Walvin does.

It is important to note, however, that, while patterns of resource endowments and labour supplies may help to explain the rise of American slavery, they do not explain why those enslaved came overwhelmingly from Africa. Walvin insists that the resort to 'servile African labour' largely reflected the 'changing costs and availability of black and white labour' p.

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