The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights

This panoramic history, a follow-up to the author's The Making of New World Slavery, puts slavery%E2%80%94and the fight against it%E2%80%94at the heart of modernity. Historian Blackburn surveys the institution in the Americas from the Spanish conquest to late%E2%80%9319th-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. (June)