The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848

In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of exotic products and popular pleasures. Some two and half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger and indigo craved by Europeans. By 1848 the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away either by independence movements, slave revolts, Abolitionist movements or some combination of all three. Robin Blackburn shows how in some cases colonial rule was overthrown while slavery flourished (as in the South of the United States and in Brazil), in others slavery was suppressed but colonial rule conserved (the British West Indies, French Windwards) while in French St. Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated. This narrative of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the #x1C;first emancipation#x1D; in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel action of slave resistance and metropolitan Abolitionism and the contradictory implications of slaveholder patriotism. The dramatic events of this epoch are examined from an unexpected vantage point, showing how the torch of anti-slavery passed from the medieval communes to dissident Quakers, from African maroons to radical pirates, from Granville Sharp and Ottabah Cuguano to Toussaint L'Ouverture, from the black Jacobins to the Liberators of South America, and from the African Baptists in Jamaica to the Revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe and the Caribbean. The Verso World History Series:This series provides attractive new editions of classic works of history, making landmark texts available to a newgeneration of readers. Covering a timespan stretching from Ancient Greece and Rome to the twentieth century, andwith a global geographical range, the series will also include thematic volumes providing insights into such topics as thespread of print cultures and the history of money.

Robin Blackburn teaches at the New School in New York and the University of Essex in the UK. He is the author of many books, including The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Age Shock, Banking on Death, and The American Crucible.