The Centrality of Slavery: Empire and Enslavement in Colonial Illinois and Missouri

＂This book examines how empires, settlers, and enslaved people created, maintained and challenged systems of slavery, and the centrality of imperial state power in present-day Illinois and Missouri. Beginning with French colonizers creating systems of Indigenous and African slavery in the 1720s, it concludes with the Missouri Crisis of 1819＂--Publisher’s description.

John Craig Hammond is Associate Professor of History at Penn State University, New Kensington