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Author Blackburn, Robin.

Title The making of New World slavery : from the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 / Robin Blackburn
Published London ; New York : Verso, 1997

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Location Call no. Vol. Availability
 MELB  306.362097 Bla/Mon  AVAILABLE
Description v, 602 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Contents Introduction: Slavery and Modernity -- Pt. 1. The Selection of New World Slavery. I. The Old World Background to New World Slavery. II. The First Phase: Portugal and Africa. III. Slavery and Spanish America. IV. The Rise of Brazilian Sugar. V. The Dutch War for Brazil and Africa. VI. The Making of English Colonial Slavery. VII. The Construction of the French Colonial System. VIII. Racial Slavery and the Rise of the Plantation -- Pt. 2. Slavery and Accumulation. IX. Colonial Slavery and the Eighteenth-Century Boom. X. The Sugar Islands. XI. Slavery on the Mainland. XII. New World Slavery, Primitive Accumulation and British Industrialization
Summary 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
At the time when European powers colonized the New World the institution of slavery had almost disappeared from Europe itself. Having overcome an institution widely regarded as oppressive and unfortunate why did they sponsor the construction of racial slave systems 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
Analysis Slavery - America - History
Notes Includes index
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references
Subject Slavery -- History.
Slavery -- America -- History.
LC no. 96045603
ISBN 1859841953 (paperback)
1859848907
Other Titles From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800