EGL 102-Expository Writing II

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography is a research tool that will help you focus on and understand the sources you have collected.

How to compose an annotated bibliography:

1. Complete the bibliographical listing for your source.
2. Discuss what this source is about.
3. Explain the author's purpose-the author's motive-for writing this article or book.
4. Discuss the authors' main conclusions.
5. Explain how this source will help you write your research paper. Why is it important to your project?


Sample:

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. New York: Perigree, 1980.

A ground-breaking study that provides a materialist analysis of slavery in the British empire. According to Williams, this book "is strictly an economic study of the role of Negro slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England, and of mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system." (1) In Williams' account, the value of the tobacco colonies of southeastern North America and the sugar islands of the Caribbean in producing staple articles for the export market laid the foundation for the rise of the West India Interest. By 1832, however, the British West Indies had become "socially an inferno...[and] economically, what was worse, an anachronism." (133) The rising capitalist class in England opposed the West India interest not on humanistic grounds, argues Williams, but rather because it was unprofitable, fundamentally monopolistic, and required protectionist trade policies. Paradoxiacally, Williams writes, "the Negroes had been stimulated to freedom by the development of the very wealth which their labour had created." (208)