| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Robin Blackburn. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern 1492–1800. New York: Verso. 1997. Pp. v, 602.

Robin Blackburn, editor of the New Left Review and admired for his Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (1988), brilliantly synthesizes a massive secondary literature on England, Europe, the Atlantic economy, and the Atlantic Americas into an arresting account of the complex alchemy of creating golden modernity from monarchical lead. He weaves culture, identities, politics and war, and subtle economic insight into a richly textured process running from the fifteenth century to the Age of Revolutions. As new worlds in America stimulated Old World slavery, plantations and commercial credit turned American slaveries into something novel, and modern consumerist, capitalist culture and its pervasive materiality—commodities themselves, as well as currency values—became the distinctive elements in eighteenth-century accumulation in England that left Britain and its empire dominant by 1800 in the Atlantic, perhaps in the world. 1

Blackburn anchors his story in Marxian analysis, but the book's genius lies in its freedom from the structural abstractions that for too long characterized both Marxian and non-Marxian attempts to explain this "great transformation." All here is dialectical process, contradictions, and subtleties. Specialists will find that the historicized contexts thus created allow Blackburn to clarify most of the academic conundrums created by overdrawing typological contrasts, including many beyond the book's ultimate elaboration on Eric Williams's linking of English Capitalism and Slavery (1944). . . .

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