The American Crucible
Slavery, Emancipation And Human Rights
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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 1780s was there the first public challenge to the ‘peculiar institution’. An anti-slavery alliance then set the scene for great acts of emancipation in Haiti in 1804, Britain in 1833–8, the United States in the 1860s, and Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In The American Crucible, Robin Blackburn argues that the anti-slavery movement forged many of the ideals we live by today.
‘The best treatment of slavery in the western hemisphere I know of. I think it should
establish itself as a permanent pillar of the literature.’ Eric Hobsbawm
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This panoramic history, a follow-up to the author's The Making of New World Slavery, puts slavery and the fight against it at the heart of modernity. Historian Blackburn surveys the institution in the Americas from the Spanish conquest to late 19th-century abolition, from Caribbean sugar islands to the American cotton belt, and assigns it a prominent and conflicted role in Western history. Slavery, he notes, thrived in a booming market economy yet contradicted its ideology of free labor; it gave slave-holding planters the power to demand freedom from imperial rule; its horrors provoked slave rebellions and an abolitionist movement that pioneered new conceptions of human rights and energized democrats, working-class radicals, and feminists, but left a legacy of racial hatred and exclusion. Though occasionally meandering and repetitive, Blackburn's narrative is lucid and readable and deftly integrates long-term trends with crises; his emphasis on the Haitian and French Revolutions, often slighted by Anglo-American histories, is especially useful. Blackburn strains in trying to make slavery the motor of early industrial capitalism, but his broad comparative approach, clear prose, and convincing interpretations make this a superb overview of the subject.
