Apocalypse of Our Times
Book Review

http://solidarity-us.org/atc/198/apocalypse/
Date Written:  2019-01-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2019
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX23473

Review of Gerald Horne's "Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism," a look at the 17th century origins of the slave trade.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism:
The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy and Capitalism
in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean
By Gerald Horne
New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018, 260 pages, paper $25

An apocalypse is "damage on an awesome or catastrophic scale," and Gerald Horne traces the transcontinental social devastation wrought in the 17th century both by the usual-suspect perpetrators - slave traders and owners - and by their unindicted co-conspirators, champions of mercantile and political freedoms in the British Isles and prerevolutionary American colonies.

Horne, professor of African-American history at the University of Houston, is an unusually multifaceted scholar, not only a historian but also a lawyer, and the prolific author of some 30 books. In this work he argues that profit lust and racialist ideology linked - and still link - the seemingly contradictory impulses of reactionaries on one hand and champions of democratic freedoms on the other.