Rethinking Early American Slavery from an International Perspective, 1450-1640

The British, and even Virginia’s first colonists, were intimately familiar with slavery and the slave trade. There was nothing exceptional about the landing of the first “20. and odd” Africans in Virginia. Their arrival was a predictable outcome of historical processes that began as early as the 15th century on the Iberian Peninsula, culminating in the variable, overlapping patterns of slaving that characterized the 17th-century circum-Caribbean and Atlantic world.