The American crucible - Robin Blackburn

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall ofslavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise ofcapitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession offateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racialenslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance. Slave produce raised upempires, fostered new cultures of consumption and financed the breakthrough to anindustrial order.

Not until the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the 1780s was there the first publicchallenge to the 'peculiar institution'. An anti-slavery alliance then set the scene for greatacts of emancipation in Haiti in 1804, Britain in 1833-8, the United States in the 1860s,and Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In The American Crucible, Robin Blackburn arguesthat the anti-slavery movement forged many of the ideals we live by today.

'The best treatment of slavery in the western hemisphere I know of. I think it should
establish itself as a permanent pillar of the literature.' Eric Hobsbawm


From the Trade Paperback edition.