In this companion volume to the acclaimed classic The Overthrow of Colonial S/avery, Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from medieval times to the early modern epoch. 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?

The Making of New World Slavery finds in the emergent West both a stigmatization of the ethno-religious Other and a new culture of consumption, freed from earlier moral restrictions. Robin Blackburn argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The Baroque state fed greedily off this commerce whilst unsuccessfully seeking to regulate slavery. 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.

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, premissed on the killing toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.

The Making of New World Slavery is a masterly study of this momentous and baleful epoch in the making of the modern world.

“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

Praise for the companion volume, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848:

“A challenge to those who fondly suppose that slavery declined as ideas of Western 'enlightenment' spread. Blackburn deserves praise for undermining complacency about the past — and the present.” … Christopher Hitchens, New York Newsday

Robin Blackburn was editor of New Left Review and is a member of NLR's editorial committee. He has taught and researched at the Universities of London, Havana, Boston and New Mexico, and recently was named Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex.

Also available:
The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery
£17.00 / $25.00
0 86091 901 3

 Publication
Cloth: April 1997
Paper: May 1998

496 pages

Cloth
1 85984 890 7
£25.00 / US$35.00

Paper
1 85984 195 3
US$25