A World Transformed
Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power
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- US$20.99
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- US$20.99
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A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world.
A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.
This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.
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Historian Walvin (Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires) asserts in this meticulous and eye-opening study that slavery was not just "fundamental to the way the West emerged," but also "created tentacles of economic activity" that affected far-flung regions not usually associated with the institution. Expertly sifting through archival records, Walvin documents how people, commodities, and ideas crossed oceans and continents, affecting societies as distant from the American South as India and Japan. He examines the emergence of the slave trade, its transatlantic and domestic variants, the methods by which slaveholders attempted to squeeze as much labor as possible from their captive workforce, and the efforts by enslaved people to assert their humanity and gain partial or total freedom. Walvin is particularly eloquent and insightful in describing how slavery underwrote both Western prosperity and the material symbols thereof, facilitating trade in polished mahogany furniture, Chinese porcelain, and other luxury goods. He also sheds valuable light on the links between slavery and modern-day environmental degradation and racial conflict. This richly detailed yet approachable history makes clear just how far and wide the grip of slavery reached.
