The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 [Paperback]

Robin Blackburn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1998

At the time when European powers colonized the Americas, the institution of slavery had almost disappeared from Europe itself. Having overcome an institution widely regarded as oppressive, why did they sponsor the construction of racial slavery in their new colonies? Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from medieval times to the early modern epoch, and finds that the stigmatization of the ethno-religious Other was given a callous twist by a new culture of consumption, freed from an earlier moral economy. 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 batten on this commerce, and - unsuccessfully - to regulate slavery and race. Successive chapters of the book consider the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Each are shown to have contributed something to the eventual consolidation of racial slavery and to the plantation revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is shown that plantation slavery emerged from the impulses of civil society rather than 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, premised on the killing toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In his companion volume to The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (Routledge, 1988), Blackburn, editor of the New Left Review, traces the development of slavery in the New World. He argues that independent traders and businessmen intent on capitalizing on the birth of consumer societies were the driving force behind the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the sustenance of the plantation system. Thus, although early-modern European states endorsed and profited from slavery, private commercial interests are held primarily responsible for the cruelties of slave traffic and the inhumane conditions of the plantation. In his extremely well-researched and readable book, the author also explains how an emerging racial consciousness was used to legitimize New World slavery and how the plantation contributed to the industrial and military success of the United States and Europe. Highly recommended for academic collections.?Raymond J. Palin, St. Thomas Univ., Miami, Fla.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

The Making of New World Slavery is the second installment in a magnificent work of contemporary scholarship, Robin Blackburn's history of the rise and fall of the slave systems of the Western Hemisphere. -- Eric Foner, The Nation

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Product Details

• Paperback: 602 pages
• Publisher: Verso; Pbk. ed edition (May 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1859841953
• ISBN-13: 978-1859841952
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,232,857 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars thorough and objective analysis of slavery in the new world, September 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (Paperback)

This is a long book, but well worth the time dedicated to reading it, especially if one is interested in understanding the real causes behind the adoption of mass slavery by Christian Nations as a basis for the economic development of the Americas. Mr. Blackburn is writing about an emotionally charged issue but never falls into the trap of emotion and sentiment. Quite the contrary: in the best tradition of historic studies, he seeks to explain and understand; as the author tells us it would have been theoretically possible to build the plantation economies of the new world upon free labour - but how much more convenient for the European colonizers to use an available (African) pool of slave labour right across the ocean. This was reinforced by the fact that not enough whites were willing to emigrate to the Americas in order to work under the harsh conditions predominant in the plantations.

Ideology also came to the rescue of the European nations; from the 15th to the 18th centuries the churches - either Catholic or Protestant - chose to legitimize black (as opposed to Indian) slavery with complicated, Bible-based theological arguments. That helped monarchs and colonizers maintain a clear conscience while enslaving millions; and Mr. Blackburn underlines the key distinction between ancient world slavery, as practised for instance by the Romans, and its modern era "Christian" version. While the former was intimately connected to the capture of POWs and was rarely perpetuated throughout the generations (manumission being a widespread practice), the latter - being a system geared for economic exploitation - was generally hostile to manumission and condemned for centuries a race QUA race to the horrors of enslavement (something that never happened in the ancient world).

This book should be mandatory reading for European" intellectuals": it would help them put in perspective the achievements of the civilisation they so much admire.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Blackburn's Superb Effort, November 15, 2000

By 

Chris Codrington (Ft. Lauderdale, FL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (Paperback)

"The Making of New World Slavery" by Robin Blackburn. This is an incredibly rich book and for the casual reader, very academic on first glance, but it contains a superbly well researched and written examination of the early roots of chattel slavery which anyone studying the Caribbean or the development of the colonial Atlantic Community should read.

This is not a book you are likely to sit down to and read cover to cover on a long winter's night, but I find myself reading sections and then putting it down, then going back to study some facet or another, and noone would be wasting money to have it in their library if they have any serious interest in understanding Slavery, the "development" of the Americas,or the world we share in the Americas today. As the other reviews have so well stated, this work is delightfully free of ideology or cant and integrates a wealth of information on the subject. We can only hope that future work on the History of the Americas will be done with such impartiality.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Valuable, January 3, 1999

By 

Tom Munro "tomfrombrunswick" (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (Paperback)

This book although by by a writer from the left is a well researched well-written survey of slavery. Without emotion it explains how slavery, something which had practically ceased to exist following the collapse of the Roman World was re-created to provide labour in colonies of the new world.

It describes the setting up of the trade occurred and how it operated in practice. The brutality, the mechanics of how slaves were obtained how they were sold, what they did as slaves.

The absence of passion makes the book an even more powerful indictment of the institution of slavery. It describes how in most of the colonies slaves were over time worked to death. In Brazil, the usual life expectancy was seven years.

The book is challenging as it raises questions about the origin of our societies and seriously challenges the notions that European Society was either civilized or Christian.