Abstract

Plantation profiteering

This article presents information on the book "The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492-1800," by Robin Blackburn. It is informed that the above mentioned book is the second installment in a magnificent work of contemporary scholarship, Robin Blackburn's history of the rise and fall of the slave systems of the Western Hemisphere. Blackburn's account draws on his remarkable command of the voluminous literature on slavery that has appeared in the past two generations. He is sensitive to subtle differences between slave systems. As in his previous works, Balckburn situates the rise of slavery in the context of the major European powers' internal histories as they competed with one another to exert control over the New World and to dominate the lucrative trade in the products-- rice, coffee and especially sugar-- that slave labor produced.