The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800 (review)

This is a brilliant survey, impressively well written, based on extraordinarily wide reading. It offers three principal features in its masterful survey of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade. First are a host of specific sketches, on topics ranging from earlier slavery within Europe, to the rise of a brilliant Creole society in the French West Indies, to the work routines of plantations on the British-held islands. Second is a thorough survey of most of the major features of the slave trade. Accounts of specific trading systems--Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, English and French--are remarkably thorough, as are summaries of the numbers of people involved on both trader and slave sides. These accounts are then extended through discussion of the emergence of the actual slave-based economies, for example in Brazilian sugar. Third, and ultimately most interesting, is an extremely plausible effort to interpret the slave trade. Here, Blackburn focuses on two principal issues: why slavery was emphasized over other potential labor systems, and what the contribution of slavery was to the development of commercial and racial modernity.

Inevitably, even in so large a book, there are omissions. While the rates of emancipation and roles of freed slaves win some attention, there is no consistently comparative treatment. The transatlantic passage itself does not greatly interest the author, though of course there are mortality figures. The work life of slaves receives extensive analysis, as part of the treatment of the establishment of the plantation system, but other aspects of slave life and mentality, including protest, are not featured. Women gain attention through the birth rate, but gender is otherwise not a major factor. Finally, while there is relevant information, impacts on Africa do not form a major topic.

What is handled is significant and enthralling. At risk of shortchanging the impressive range of coverage, three topics command consistent analysis, with important results. First, Blackburn is extremely interested in the cultural context for slavery, the ways in which Christian views required and received adjustment and the ways in which race emerged as a new cultural category through the interpretation and justification of modern slavery. Specific evaluation of Catholicism, Dutch Calvinism, and English Puritanism drives home the religious adjustment point. At one point Blackburn talks directly about the rearrangement of moral codes, but he also attends to the contemporary critics of slavery (and their sometimes unhappy fates), from the Portuguese case on through the other European participants.

The second key topic, brilliantly handled at times, involves a comparison between slavery and other labor systems toward demonstrating why slavery was chosen. Greater disease resistance seems to explain the decision against European indenture (which was otherwise cheaper), while a more intriguing planter preference for "tied" labor, explains the rejection of wage labor. Cases, such as Andean silver, where slavery was not preferred add to this analysis. While the author's assessments are stimulating, I do think too little weight is given to American demographic collapse in the formulation of tied labor. It was not just that wage labor was more mobile, but that its scarcity threatened to push up costs.

Finally, Blackburn is eager to show how slavery served as a crucible for a modern, industrial economy. Here his analysis includes important data on the accumulation of capital and the larger capitalist framework for transatlantic slavery. But he pushes beyond this, to show the salience of new work arrangements and discipline, the gradual emergence of planter concerns for productivity--in sum, how the planters served as prototypical modern entrepreneurs. Here, the book becomes important grist not only for students of slavery, but also for readers interested in economic modernization more generally. His claims are bold, surpassing the usual statements about slavery and capitalism, and in the long run some more explicit connections between slavery and the...