My friend Bill Dusinberre, who has died aged 92, was a reader in history at Warwick University and specialised in American slavery, about which he wrote several books.
Bill’s three key books on slavery – Them Dark Days (1996), Slavemaster President (2003) and Strategies for Survival (2009) – posed challenges both to the tradition that linked slavery with paternalism and to scholarship that regarded enslaved people as able to gain quite large measures of agency and community solidarity.
