City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

The making of New World slavery, from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800, Robin Blackburn

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

The making of New World slavery

Robin Blackburn

from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800

"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 -- unsuccessfully -- to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this history, 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 the 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." -- Publisher description

Introduction: Slavery and Modernity ---- Part I. The Selection of New World Slavery. 1. The Old World Background to New World Slavery --- 2. The First Phase: Portugal and Africa --- 3. Slavery and Spanish America --- 4. The Rise of Brazilian Sugar --- 5. The Dutch War for Brazil and Africa --- 6. The Making of English Colonial Slavery --- 7. The Construction of the French Colonial System --- 8. Racial Slavery and the Rise of the Plantation ---- part II. Slavery and Accumulation. 9. Colonial Slavery and the Eighteenth-Century Boom --- 10. The Sugar Islands --- 11. Slavery on the Mainland --- 12. New World Slavery, Primitive Accumulation and British Industrialization