The Making of New World Slavery
From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800
Blackburn, Robin
Publisher: Verso
Year Published: 1997
Pages: 602pp ISBN: 978-1859848906
Resource Type: Book
Cx Number: CX12660
Traces the development of slavery in the new world, with its origins in trade and business enterprise.
Abstract:
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From publisher:
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought—successfully—to feed upon this commerce and—with markedly less success—to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of individual states.
Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.
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