Customer Reviews

The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery

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Another excellent book on slavery by Robin Blackburn. This book is an outstanding synthesis of a large literature on the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and of slavery in the Caribbean and Spanish America. Blackburn opens with a concise description of the highly economically successful state of colonial slavery that existed in the Atlantic world and of the powerful forces fostered its development and apparently guaranteed its stability. Briefly, and this is the subject of another outstanding Blackburn book on the origins of colonial slavery, expanding European capitalism backed up by the success of the powerful imperial British and French states resulted in vigorous slavery based production systems. How this system cracked is the subject of this book. In a series of very well written and documented chapters, Blackburn discusses the origins of anti-slavery agitation, particularly in Britain, the American colonies of Britain, and France, the impacts of the American, French and Spanish American Revolutions, the great Haitian slave revolt, and the post-Napoleonic events leading to campaigns against the slave trade and for abolition. Briefly, the abolition of the slave trade and slave emancipation occurred in the Caribbean and Spanish America because of favorable conjunctions of 3 major factors; political crises reducing the influence of slave holding interests and usually in settings of revolution or (in the case of Britain) considerable pressure for political reform, threatened or actual major slave resistance, and metropolitan political currents that mobilized relatively broad political coalitions in which anti-slavery was an important component of reformist or actual revolutionary movements. Blackburn is particularly good at showing the complex interactions between these features. His discussions, for example, of the complex politics of Revolutionary France or the British anti-slavery movement during the Napoleonic period are outstanding. He is excellent on interactions between events in the colonies and the metropolitan centers, particularly in the way in which slave resistance, especially the great Haitian slave revolt, had consequences throughout the Atlantic world.

Another crucial Blackburn point is that many of the social and economic forces that propelled colonial slavery also contributed to the growth of anti-slavery movements. In a double irony, some of these forces also contributed greatly to deepening and success of slavery in the 3 regions where slavery persisted after its extinction in the Caribbean and Spanish America; the USA, Brazil, and Cuba. This book should be read with Blackburn's equally good book on the development of slavery in the western hemisphere. I believe that Overthrow... was written first but I recommend reading The Making of New World Slavery first, then this book. Blackburn has just published a book that takes the story through to the second half of the 19th century and the death of slavery in the USA, Cuba, and Brazil, an exciting prospect for readers interested in this important topic.