Description: John Samuel Harpham shows that the development of slavery in the English Atlantic world was underpinned by a tradition of ideas rooted in Roman law. This tradition, which explained enslavement as the common fate of war captives, informed attitudes toward Africa and became the basis for the earliest defenses of American slavery.
Brief description: John Samuel Harpham is Assistant Professor of Classics and Letters and Wick Cary Professor in the Institute for the American Constitutional Heritage at the University of Oklahoma.
Review Quotes: This book is a thrilling intellectual adventure. Lucid and invigorating, it challenges many scholarly commonplaces about the intellectual framework within which the British slave trade and New World plantation slavery emerged. In vivid prose, John Harpham illuminates the paradoxes inherent to the dawning acceptance of slavery in a culture that largely saw freedom as natural to all human beings. --Kwame Anthony Appiah, author of The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity