THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE MODERN, 1492-1800 - ROBIN BLACKBURN

This is the one. I’ve been hoping for something like this for a long time and finally found it. You might have noticed I’ve been on a bit of a kick over the last 2 years, or so, reading about the Atlantic Slave trade and the early colonization of the New World. Off the top of my head, THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA, SLAVE SHIP, BARRACOON, SUN MOON AND WITCHES, FIST FULL OF SHELLS, 5TH SUN, FEAR OF THE BLACK BODY, all deal with this topic from some angle or another, and they work best considered in relation to one another, all telling the same story dozens of different ways. This book, TMONWS, is the best overall history I’ve encountered and offers what I’ve always wanted, a grand view of the whole process. This book took forever to read, I must have renewed it from the library 3-4 times. It also had me stopping and marking passages to write down almost constantly. The picture that emerges is fascinating. Blackburn is an economist and leftist so he highlights the way that Atlantic Slavery began in the era of feudalism and ended during the rise industrial capitalism, and how the changes in this system mirror and contribute to this rise. The book structures itself as a straightforward history at first. It covers slavery in general, especially in Europe, before this era, then goes through the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English versions and permutations of this trade. The parts where he takes a step back to compare them were some of the most fascinating to me, “The English perception of racial difference had a sharper edge to it than the Spanish or the Portuguese, especially where people of color were concerned. The Iberians were more familiar with the Africans, more attentive to the different shades and conditions of those African or partly African descent...The English sense of private property, sharped by the rise of capitalist market relationships, was to put the accent on the slave as chattel and almost entirely to eclipse the notion that the slave was a human being.” Likewise the other systems that were tried and false starts before the system we think of as Atlantic Slavery were fascinating. It’s important to keep in mind that this system of racial chattel slavery didn’t spring up fully formed, nor was it the only option or the only thing people tried. From English attempts to build plantations in Ireland, to convict labor, to tracing the Virginian laws around indentured servitude, this book highlights all sorts of different arrangements that were tried out. Blackburn does a good job, I think, of explaining why the system of racial, chattel slavery came to dominate the region, “The racial doctrine which saw African captives a made for slavery was the work of no one social category or European nation and continued to exhibit different patterns, interpretations. The Portuguese and Spanish principal of formally confining slavery to Africans had furnished a precedent which the Dutch, English and French made far more systematic. By closing off nearly every avenue to manumission the English produced the sharpest polarization between free whites and black slaves. For most Europeans the Africans’ lack of Christianity and “savage” nature was thought to explain the need to keep them in bondage. The story of Noah’s curse, the theory that blackness constituted the symbol of this curse, furnished justification for the permanent enslavement of blacks regardless of their faith or conduct. But it did not supply legal formulations for treating slaves as property-those were furnished by residues of Roman Law, with coke as well as Bossuet invoking the jus gentium, as we have seen. Where capitalist relations had emerged the sacred aura they gave to private property cast a cloak over chattel slavery, while the biblical injunction to bring forth the fruits of the earth was harnessed to accumulation and slave planting. As the new slave systems were consolidated they thus combined the secular and the sacred, the old and the new.” There’s a strange part in the middle where he imagines alternatives based solely on free labor but also involving African labor in the form of indentured servant style contracts. This is hard but invigorating to imagine. What an amazing world that would be now. Likewise, there is a long chapter at the back that seeks to answer the question, “how much did slavery contribute to the birth/rise of capitalism?” or, “What is the relation between the birth of industrial capitalism and slavery?” Now, I would answer both of the questions with, “a lot” and “foundational” respectively, but, apparently, the critical consensus used to be otherwise. Blackburn spends a lot of time disproving these assumptions and placing slavery in it’s proper context. To simplify, it seems like he credits slavery with about 20% of the growth during this period in Britain but also finds interesting trends, like the idea that the colonies were much more interested in industrial, and this mass produced, products than their Old World counterparts, which really helped build the market and that the labor control systems, especially the idea that you were trying to maximize output from workers and could totally prescribe methods (which isn’t possible in feudalism), necessary for large-scale factory-style capitalism were pioneered in plantations. There’s so much here. Lots of intriguing information about religious movements in Africa during this time period related to the horrors of the slave-trade, lots of information about maroonage and resistance in the New World, lots of information about how this related to European relations with various indigenous groups, and, perhaps most importantly to me, lots of information about how some (not nearly enough) Europeans, at every stage, pointed out how fucked up and evil this all was. Like the best histories, TMONWS shows that history isn’t predestined, that at every stage, over the course of a lifetime, starting whenever you like, the social relations and power relations and possibilities change. And people at the time were just as aware of this as we are of our time now, and all of them were pushing and negotiating and making bargains and moral judgments about what they wanted from their lives. This book does a great job of making that fact feel true and gives the reader a birds eye view of this whole system coming into place without making it seem teleological or outside of human control. I’m sure I’ll be thinking about this book for years. I’m already using it to reevaluate what I’ve read elsewhere. Anyone who’s interested in American history needs to read this, this is where we come from. 1619 crossings.