The Making of New World Slavery From the Baroque to the Modern 1492-1800 by Robin Blackburn. London and New York, 1998. 602 pp.

Abstract

Robin Blackburn's mighty tome talces readers on a historical journey through
three hundred years of colonial slavery in the New World. As one travels through
Europe, Africa, and the Americas, one meets a wide range of characters: slaves,
slave traders, merchants, seamen, national navies and armies, free and indentured
laborers, planters, national leaders, and government officials, all of whom have a
part to play that is duly examined by the author. The author has drawn on a very
wide variety of sow-ces: American, British, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese,
and Latin texts, ranging from the texts of antiquity to those of the late twentieth
century. Some useful maps of the period are included, as well as infonnative illustrations
and many tables of economic and demographic surveys of the colonies.
The detailed notes provide helpful signposts to readers wishing to pursue certain
aspects of slavery and related topics in greater depth. The book comprises twelve
chapters as well as an introduction, an epilogue, and a comprehensive index.
In the Introduction, the author describes the book as "an account of the making
of the European systems of colonial slavery in the Americas" (p. 3). The author
attempts to show its role in the advent of modernity and to examine slavery in its
historical perspective as an ever-present reality. Indeed, slavery existed from the
earliest of times and was accepted as part of life by the Greek and Roman civilizations
and later by Christianity. The main justification for slavery was difference -
implying inferiority -which could be derived from ethnicity, color, social status,
genealogy, or criminal behavior. Prisoners of war were also frequently enslaved ...