Abolition
A History of Slavery and Antislavery

This book examines the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.

Seymour Drescher (Author)

9780521600859, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 July 2009

484 pages
22.9 x 15.4 x 3 cm, 0.66 kg

'Seymour Drescher has given us the most comprehensive account to date of the rise and fall of modern slavery … The book is the fruit of a lifetime's work by a scholar whose interests have ranged over the entire field of slave studies. It is unlikely that we will see another study of this scope and calibre for a long time.' The Times Literary Supplement

In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old World empires under the banner of antislavery. However, twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of New World slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions and contractions of the institution of slavery and the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.

Part I. Extension: 1. A perennial institution
2. Expanding slavery
3. Extension and tension
4. Border skirmishes
Part II. Crisis: 5. Age of American revolution 1770s–1820s
6. Franco-American revolutions 1780s–1820s
7. Latin American revolutions 1810s–1820s
8. Abolitionism without revolution: Great Britain 1770s–1820s
Part III. Contraction: 9. British emancipation
10. From colonial emancipation to global abolition
11. The end of slavery: Anglo-America
12. Abolishing New World slavery: Latin America
13. Constructing Old World slavery: 1870s–1920s
Part IV. Reversion: 14. Inversion in Europe
15. Afterword.

Subject Areas: Slavery & abolition of slavery [HBTS], General & world history [HBG]