Description
The enslavement of Africans in the Americas profoundly shaped the continent's demography, cultures, languages, and legal systems, playing a decisive role in modern economic growth and the rise of industrial capitalism. Yet, its historical interpretation remains contested. One view sees modern slavery as beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, disconnecting it from earlier traditions in Europe, Africa, and Asia. Another claims slavery is a universal institution, unchanged across millennia. Moving beyond this dichotomy, the book offers a new framework for the study of Black slavery in the Americas. It situates slavery within a broader and older human geography: a world region of enslavement that dates back to the deep historical formation of the Mediterranean basin. By tracing the emergence of modern slavery from within this ancient system, the book sheds new light on its conditions of existence, collapse, and reconfiguration up to the present day.
Table of Contents
Preface; 1. The economy of slavery: theory and history; 2. The greater Mediterranean as a world region of slavery; 3. From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic: capital and slavery; 4. The Atlantic slave trade: a calculating and incalculable machine; 5. Industrial capital and the fall of slavery; 6. Why is it so hard to think about slavery historically?; 7. Slavery today: in the close present, so Old; References.
