A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power
A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world.
 
A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.
 
This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.
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A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power
A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world.
 
A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.
 
This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.
34.95 In Stock
A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

by James Walvin
A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

by James Walvin

Hardcover(First Edition)

$34.95 
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Overview

A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world.
 
A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.
 
This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520386242
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 05/17/2022
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 400
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

James Walvin is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York. He has published widely on modern social history and the history of slavery. He has held fellowships in Britain, the United States, Australia, and the Caribbean. In 2008 he was awarded the O.B.E. for his services to scholarship.
 

Table of Contents

Maps x

Introduction xv

Part 1 The Trade

1 The Scattering of People 3

2 Spanish Origins 10

3 Spain and the Other Slavery 20

4 Slavery, Sugar and Power 36

Part 2 People and Cargoes

5 Bound for Africa: Cargoes 59

6 The Dead 88

Part 3 Internal Trades

7 Upheavals 105

8 Brazil's Internal Slave Trade 115

9 The Domestic US Slave Trade 125

Part 4 Managing Slavery

10 A World of Paper: Accounting for Slavery 143

11 Managing Slavery 175

12 Brute Force 191

13 Working 207

Part 5 Demanding Freedom

14 Finding a Voice 225

15 Demanding Freedom 246

Part 6 A World Transformed

16 Beauty and the Beast 275

17 A World Transformed 315

18 Slavery Matters 331

Acknowledgements 355

Guide to Further Reading 359

Index 367

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