In The Reckoning, Robin Blackburn explains how a dynamic fusion of capitalism and slavery turbo-charged plantation agriculture in the early nineteenth slavery. The slaveholders of the US South, Cuba and Brazil not only survived the first wave of anti-slavery but updated and fortified their plantation regimes.
Blackburn identifies the new lands, new agronomy and enhanced credit-worthiness of the plantations of the Second Slavery - and the vital contribution its swelling revenues made to US continental expansion. The Second Slavery financed factories and steam-age transportation while supplying a new consumerism with cotton, coffee and sugar. Capitalism promoted the spread of slavery and racial oppression because it was indifferent to the human costs of enslavement.
The enslaving wedge was, to all appearances, securely lodged within a wider Atlantic capitalism, yet it generated fatal conflicts and contradictions, which opened the way to the fearful reckoning of the 1860s and 1870s. The supposedly invincible Slave Power was defied and defeated by extraordinary cross-class, international and interracial alliances. US abolitionism was itself radicalised by Atlantic currents of support and solidarity from Haiti and Africa, Brazil and Mexico, Spain and Cuba, Britain and Ireland. Blackburn narrates the difficult victory over the enslavers, country by country, decade by decade, while exposing the racial backlash which brought on Jim Crow and cheated the freedmen and freedwomen of the rightful fruits of their struggle.
- ISBN10 1804293415
- ISBN13 9781804293416
- Publish Date 7 November 2023
- Publish Status Forthcoming
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Verso Books
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 688
- Language English