BOOK: Joseph Samuel HARPHAM, The Intellectual Origins of American Slavery. English Ideas in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard UP, 2025), ISBN9780674278370

 

(image source: Harvard UP)

Abstract:

A landmark account of the origins of American slavery, revealing how ancient Roman ideas were used to defend the establishment of a slave empire in the English Atlantic world. The period from 1550 to 1700 was critical in the development of slavery across the English Atlantic world. During this time, English discourse about slavery revolved around one central question: How could free persons be made into slaves? John Samuel Harpham shows that English authors found answers to this question in a tradition of ideas that stretched back to the ancient world, where they were most powerfully expressed in Roman law. These ideas, in turn, became the basis for the earliest defenses of American slavery.

On the author:

John Samuel Harpham is Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Professor in the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma. 

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