Ira Berlin. Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
This synthetic history of slavery in the United States from the early Virginia colony through the Revolutionary period at the very end of the eighteenth century divides the (future) United States into four main areas for the purposes of slave societies--the North, the Chesapeake/Upper South, the Lowcountry/Lower South, and the Lower Mississippi Valley. Berlin acknowledges that other divisions could have been possible--the Upper South could have been split between Tidewater and Piedmont, for one example--but makes a convincing argument that his categories are both valid and useful. Any further delineation might very well have made the study too complex.
Berlin also makes a distinction between a "society with slaves" versus a "slave society." The latter is completely organized around slave holding both as a central economic activity and an organizing social principle, while the former describes a society in which slave holding is legal and possibly even widely practiced but does not dominate social and economic life.
Within those spatial and conceptual frames, Berlin summarizes the state and development of slavery in each region, over the course of three different time periods. Part One recounts the "Charter Generations", the experience of the early slaves in North America, who were frequently creoles who were cosmopolitan natives of the Atlantic World. Part Two recounts the "Plantation Generations" who experienced the slow development of indigenous slavery in mainland North America. Part Three recounts the "Revolutionary Generation" who experienced the disruptions of the late-18th century revolutions--revolutions which both offered new avenues for freedom yet paradoxically led to Northern "free"states in which African-American life was increasingly compromised and constricted; and a rapid growth and spread of plantation slavery across the Lower South, a region which would ultimately encompass both the old Lowcountry and the Lower Mississippi.
The book ends at the dawn of the 19th century and the cotton revolution which would exacerbate the spread of slavery and lead the southern United States to ever more aggressively defend the slave society cotton helped create.
