Portside

Historical scholarship is looking anew into the ways that slavery was intertwined with the movement that created the American Revolution. Here is one of the most recent forays into that line of inquiry.

This book, which won the American Book Award last month, aims to reorient our thinking about slavery, by focusing on "slave-breeding," a practice that helped ensure the institution's survival after the Constitutional ban on the transatlantic trade went into effect in 1808. In this review, Malcolm Harris discusses the implications of the practice, by outlining just how central slavery was to the production of U.S. wealth.