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Title: The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn ISBN: 1-85984-195-3 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: May, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The original sins of economic man
Comment: The rise of the modern world is beset by a contradiction: even as the institutions of a new freedom were emerging in a core area the cancer of slavery began to recur its periphery. We should conclude that we have a laboratory study of the nature of economic man in relation to the genuine self-consciousness able to create a new culture, and determined to be finished with the curse of history. This book contains some graphic portraiture of this faultline in modernity, and opens with a gripping depiction of the slavers arriving in the ancient Congo.
Superb work.
Rating: 5
Summary: Blackburn's Superb Effort
Comment: "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.
Rating: 5
Summary: thorough and objective analysis of slavery in the new world
Comment: 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.
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Title: Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 by John Thornton, Michael Adas, Edmund Burke III, Philip D. Curtin ISBN: 0521627249 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848 by Robin Blackburn ISBN: 0860919013 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: August, 1989 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin ISBN: 0674002113 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 04 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Black Jacobins : Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C.L.R. James ISBN: 0679724672 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 23 October, 1989 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas by David Eltis ISBN: 052165548X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 28 October, 1999 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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