8/8/2019 Precis Blackburn Slavery

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Andrew S. Terrell

HIST 6393: Atlantic History to 1750

Prcis: Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern,

1492-1800. London: Verso, 1997.

Professor Robin Blackburn is a British social historian who focuses on colonialism,

revolutions, and slavery. In his survey of Atlantic Slavery, Blackburn analyzes the experiences

of the slave trade under the major empires of the modern era--the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch,

English, and French. His analyses follow a few larger topics covered at length for each empire:

Religious problems in defense of and in condemnation of slavery as it emerged, the social

struggle with choosing slavery as a labor force, and how slave systems hastened the industrial

revolution and subsequent prominence of mercantilist capitalist political economies. Blackburn

uses the latter theme to supplant his thesis that plantation economies boomed during the

seventeenth century and not earlier which raises many questions over the Caribbean Islands. The

result of his efforts in The Making of New World Slavery is a top-down approach to how the slavetrade fit into mainstream Atlantic history.

The image of the Baroque era in the Selection of New World Slavery part served to

explain the chaos dealt with the expansion of colonialism and power in the state or private

efforts. At its heart, the Baroque links the modern era to the classical world and thus in this

context personifies the darker elements of the rapid transition. Blackburn contends the rise of the

consumer class in urban areas beckoned a quick evolution of mass production in order to

maintain the new modern society. Blackburn sees early slavery as being wasteful and inflexible

and thus unprofitable early on. However, he notes the seemingly evolutionary changes to slave

systems and slave trade that climax with the English system in the American middle and

southern colonies. To Blackburn, the new systems were independent of Old World traditions andthe only connection to them was trial and error phases that culminated in the racial identity of the

modern plantation.

Marxs principles of primitive accumulation are used in analyzing the new plantation

system. Blackburn made direct correlations between the rising English system of capitalism and

the expansion of slave plantations. He contends only the English were successful on such a large

scale, which this reader agrees with. By 1800, Blackburn believes that slavery as an institution

was a modern consumerist, capitalist venture with slaves as the currency. From this vantage he

shows how each successive empire left an impression on the slave trade. Thus, we see the reason

for his title baroque to modern as an evolutionary market expansion from controlled absolutism

to an international commercial enterprise.

To extoll the slave institution, however, was not Blackburns goal. The language of his

monograph settles rather as a more objective approach reminiscent of business history today.

Though he does not give agency to the slaves themselves as other studies do, the macro approach

to the Atlantic slave trade is equally important in understanding the rapid expansion of capitalist

markets in the modern world. We see from the case study of the slave trade that plantations in

themselves were not the true predecessors to post Age of Revolutions industrial factories, rather

it was the slave trade in and of itself.

! Wednesday; 20 October 2010