Extensive archival and anecdotal sources support Michael Mullin's description of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Drawing upon case histories, Mullin offers new and definitive information about how African people met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives through religion, family life, and economic strategies.

Michael Mullin is a professor of history at California State University and the author of Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.

Introduction   1

I   THE UNSEASONED
1   Naming Africans   13
2   Africans Name Themselves   34
3   The Blood Oath, Play, and Ancestors   62

II   PLANTATION SLAVES
4   Plantations: Case Studies   77
5   "Scientific" Planters: The Ideology of Industrial Regimentation in Mature Slave Societies   115
6   The Slaves' Economic Strategies: Food, Markets, and Property   126
7   Family   159
8   Plantation Religion and Resistance   174

III   THE ASSIMILATEDS
9   Slave Resistance in an Era of War and Revolution, 1768-1805   215
10   Mission Christianity and Preemancipation Rebellion   241
11   Epilogue: Africa in America   268

Appendixes   281
Notes   309
Bibliography   385
Index   405