Robin Blackburn

The Reckoning offers the first rounded account of the rise and fall of the Second Slavery—large-scale plantation slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, Cuba, and the US South. Robin Blackburn shows how a fusion of industrial capitalism and transatlantic war and revolution turbo-charged racial oppression and the westwards expansion of the United States. Blackburn identifies the new territories, new victims, and new...

In 1770, a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of products, both everyday and exotic. Some two and a 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...