The American Crucible

April 18, 2011
This panoramic history, a follow-up to the author's The Making of New World Slavery, puts slaveryâand the fight against itâat the heart of modernity. Historian Blackburn surveys the institution in the Americas from the Spanish conquest to lateâ19th-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.