Wendy Warren

A New York Times Editor’s Choice

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

“Whereas most studies of slavery in the United States concern the antebellum South, this one stakes out less visited territory—the laws and decisions made by the colonists in New England two centuries earlier.” — The New Yorker

“[Warren] builds on and generously acknowledges more than two generations of research into the social history of New England and the economic history of the Atlantic world. But not  only has she mastered that scholarship, she has also brought it together in an original way, and deepened the story with fresh research…New England Bound conveys the disorientation, the deprivation, the vulnerability, the occasional hunger and the profound isolation that defined the life of most African exiles in Puritan New England, where there was no plantation community.” — Christopher L. Brown, New York Times Book Review

“[Warren] widens the lens to show the early New England economy was enmeshed in the seafaring trade that developed between four Atlantic continents for the transport, clothing, and feeding of African captives. The region’s early growth and prosperity, Warren shows, sprang from that tainted commerce. . . . Southerners resentful of Northerners’ condescension about the slaveholding past may find some comfort in these pages. In them should be some Northern discomfort too.” — Kenneth J. Cooper, Boston Globe

"This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight