ABSTRACT
In exploring the development of black life in British North America, Ira Berlin offers yet another way of characterizing its regional diversity. He identifies three provincial slave societies, grouping New England and the Mid-Atlantic into one Northern farm system, and then locating two Southern plantation systems, one in the Chesapeake and the other in the Lower South. In addition to spatial variations, Berlin emphasizes temporal change. Black life in early America was not static but rather thoroughly dynamic. Most significant in shaping Afro-American cultures, Berlin argues, were the dimensions and pace of the slave trade, the varying proportions of whites and blacks, and the type of work in which slaves engaged. By the eve of the American Revolution, the differential effects of these three factors, particularly evident in contrasting balances of Creoles and Africans, had created contrasting Afro-American cultures: heavily influenced by whites in the North; thoroughly Creole in the Chesapeake; and most African in the Lower South.
