Includes index

Includes bibliographical references and index

Civil slavery and the colonial state -- Shifting identity and racial slavery -- From the Baroque to the Creole -- pt. 1. The selection of New World slavery. I. The Old World background to New World slavery: Rome and the Christian embrace of slavery ; Christian resurgence and the challenge of Islam ; Feudal expansion and ideologies of persecution ; Slavery in Iberia's Christian kingdoms ; Slavery and the Slavs ; The eclipse of serfdom and the rise of agrarian capitalism ; The Bible, slavery and the nations of man ; The Mediterranean, the Atlantic and black bondage ; Africans and the Islamic slave trade ; Conclusion -- II. The first phase: Portugal and Africa: Exploring the African coast ; The beginnings of a slave trade ; The Atlantic islands ; African slaves in the peninsula ; Imperial Portugal, Africa, and Atlantic civilization -- III. Slavery and Spanish America. False start in the Caribbean ; Silver and revenue: exploitation without enslavement ; Slaveholding in a Baroque empire ; Projects and arguments -- IV. The rise of Brazilian sugar: La France Antarctique ; The takeoff of the sugar economy ; The transatlantic slave trade and Africa ; Arguments over slavery ; Slavery and the looming battle for the Americas -- V. The Dutch war for Brazil and Africa: The West India Company ; The Dutch in Brazil and Africa ; The Luso-Brazilian recoil ; Sources of Dutch weakness ; The new role of the Dutch -- VI. The making of English colonial slavery: The first colonies ; Barbados and the rise of sugar ; The role of captains and new merchants ; Tobacco and sugar ; Plantation labour, slavery and fear of strange women ; Civil war: empire and bondage ; The restoration and the codification of colonial slavery ; Bacon's Rebellion and Virginian slavery ; The new slavery and the Caribbean plantation ; The Glorious Revolution and the colonies -- VII. The construction of the French colonial system: An experiment in mercantilism ; The testimony of Du Tertre ; The code noir ; Royal ambitions and the spirit of colonial autonomy ; Dynastic calculation, Baroque spectacle and colonial development -- VIII. Racial slavery and the rise of the plantation: Planters, merchants, captains ; Plantation labour: from indenture to slavery ; The supply of slaves and the turn to slavery ; The new plantation ; The plantation regime and the question of security ; Alternatives to slavery? -- pt. 2. Slavery and accumulation. IX. Colonial slavery and the eighteenth-century boom: Europe and the Atlantic ; The slave trade in the eighteenth century ; The pattern of trade and shipping -- X. The sugar islands: Economics and demography in the British Caribbean ; The French West Indies ; Anglo-French patterns of colonial trade ; The brilliance of French Creole society -- XI. Slavery on the mainland: North America and the reproduction of slavery ; Slavery in Brazil's golden age ; Slavery in Spanish America ; The lesser producers and the logic of the plantation trade -- XII. New world slavery, primitive accumulation and British industrialization: Markets in Africa and the New World ; Profits and investment ; Sectors of investment and new financial instruments ; Raw materials ; Plantation products and the new world of consumption ; War, colonies and industrialization ; The Anglo-French wars of 1793-1815: a test ; Epilogue

"At the time when European powers colonized the New World the institution of slavery had almost disappeared from Europe itself. Having overcome an institution widely regarded as oppressive and unfortunate why did they sponsor the construction of racial slave systems in their new colonies? Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from medieval times to the early modern epoch, and finds that the stigmatization of the ethno-religious Other was given a callous twist by a new culture of consumption, freed from an earlier moral economy. 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 batten on this commerce, and - unsuccessfully - to regulate slavery and race. Successive chapters of the book consider the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Each are shown to have contributed something to the eventual consolidation of racial slavery and to the plantation revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is shown that plantation slavery emerged from the impulses of civil society rather than from the strategies of the individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. In the colonies the planters always had to reckon with the efforts of the enslaved to resist their fate and to construct the elements of a new creole identity. Finally he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, premised on the killing toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West."--Jacket