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BOOK REVIEWS

EXCELLENT WORK, RICH IN CONTENT,
IMAGINATIVELY WRITTEN

THE BLACKS IN CANADA: A History. By Robin W. Winks. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal. 546 pages. $15.00.

AMERICAN scholarship, especially in recent years, has begun to document and analyze the history of black experience in the United States.  Far less is known of the related experiences of their brothers to the North, related by ties of common background and common persecution.
  Now there has appeared this impressive historical work, the result of extensive and painstaking research which took the author from the United States, to Europe, to Africa and the Caribbean, to document a long-neglected phase of the history of African descendants in the New World. It is, unquestionably a fundamental contribution to black history, Canadian history, and to the study of Canadian-American relations.
  For many black Americans, Canada is known mainly as the country where the star of freedom led and where the Underground Rail-road had its terminus, where the air of freedom in after-years was purer-even into the mid-Twentieth Century.  It comes as something of a shock to read in this book in how many ways the tragic history of enslavement in Canada, of nominal freedom granted but coupled with economic disability, of arrant racism persisting to our day, parallels in so many ways the story of blacks in the United States.
  Within a few years after the first Africans were brought as slaves to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, the British conquerors of Quebec had brought in Tadoussac, a boy of five or six years old, the first African slave to be sold in Canada, who served under several masters, was baptized a Catholic, and eventually died a free man.
  Other slaves-not black-had preceded Tadoussac.  More than a century earlier, the Portuguese had enslaved American Indians in the Canadian North, and the French continued to prefer the Indians as slaves until English settlers began bringing in substantial numbers of blacks.  Black slavery, however, never became deeply rooted in French Canada where gradual abolition began in 1793 and where the mode of existence, with no economic base for the support of large-scale farming operations made slavery unprofitable.

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