““Americans have found it particularly difficult to come to terms with our “slave origins,” perhaps because the national history of the United States makes it easy to forget that the thirteen mainland colonies were only a part of the larger trading network of the British Empire, and the northern states all abolished slavery within two decades of the American Revolution. But in the colonial era, slavery was legal in all parts of British America, and it was economically significant even in many areas that later became free states. Slave labor was used successfully in such””
