The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance. Slave produce raised up empires, fostered new cultures of consumption and financed the breakthrough to an industrial order. Not until the stirrings of a revolutionary age in...
The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries ens...
In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger and indigo craved by Europeans. By 1848 the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away either by independence movements, slave revolts, abolitionists or some combination of all three. How did this happen? Robin Blackburn's history captures the complexity of a revolutionary age in a compelling narrative. In some cases colonial...
In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a half millio...
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 feed upon this commerce and--with markedly less success--to regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of...
The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise ...
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agreed on the cause of "free labor" and the urgent need to end slavery. In his introduction, Robin Blackburn argues that Lincoln's response signaled the importance of the German American community and the role of the international communists in opposing European recognition of the Confederacy. The ideals of communism, voiced through the International Working Men's Association, attracted many thousands of supporters throughout the US, and helped...
Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln exchanged letters at the end of the Civil War. Although they were divided by far more than the Atlantic Ocean, they agre...
