By 1848 the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away either by independence movements, slave revolts, Abolitionist movements or some combination of all three. Robin Blackburn shows how in some cases colonial rule was overthrown while slavery flourished (as in the South of the United States and in Brazil), in others slavery was surpressed but colonial rule conserved (the British West Indies, French Windwards) while in French St. Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated.

This narrative of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the “first emancipation” in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel action of slave resistance and metropolitan Abolitionism and the contradictory implications of slaveholder patriotism.

The dramatic events of this epoch are examined from an unexpected vantage point, showing how the torch of anti-slavery passed from the medieval communes to dissident Quakers, from African maroons to radical pirates, from Granville Sharp and Ottabah Cuguano to Toussaint L'Ouverture, from the black Jacobins to the Liberators of South America, and from the African Baptists in Jamaica to the Revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe and the Caribbean.

This first account of the overthrow of colonial slavery in the Age of Revolution has become a classic interpretation of crucial episodes in the making of the modern world.

Robin Blackburn has taught and researched at the Universities of London, Havana, Boston and New Mexico, and has served as editor of New Left Review. He is now Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex. His The Making of New World Slavery is also published by Verso.

“...opens new vistas with the necessary foundations of historical range and precision.” — CLR James

“... one of the finest studies of slavery and abolition to appear in many years.” — Eric Foner

“... 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

560 pages

Paper
0 86091 901 3
US$25 / £17