ABSTRACT
Prior to 1780, slavery existed in all European settler societies in the Americas. For many years the historiography of American slavery was dominated by the study of those portions of Anglophone America that became the United States and by the study of Brazil, but during recent decades an explosion of scholarship has both broadened and deepened knowledge of slavery throughout the hemisphere. It has become clear that slavery was a remarkably flexible institution, taking different forms and playing different economic, social, and cultural roles in the gold and silver mines in South and Central America, the cities of Spanish and Luso America, the logging frontiers of Central America, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the ships plying the Atlantic, and the farms, towns, and plantations of North America. The wealth of local and regional studies that has revealed this variety has also uncovered a wide range of labor relations, living arrangements, family structures, and cultural responses. In all of these settings, however, historians have found evidence that the enslaved resisted their oppression.
