The publication of Robin Blackburn’s The Reckoning, concluding his quintet on the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery over four centuries, offers an opportunity to reassess the current state of scholarship in this important field, as well as to consider the place within it of Blackburn’s work. The literature here is vast, investigating multiple realms, economic, political and cultural, and analytically distinct processes—the slave trade, colonizations, plantation systems, slave revolts, politics of abolitionism—within widely varied national and transnational contexts, as well as seeking to explain the dynamics of historical development and change. Scholarly investigations also intersect with a broader literature, speaking to the salience of slavery’s still unresolved social and cultural legacies. Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish the operations of particular historiographical paradigms that have had a significant influence on the overall direction of this scholarship. Two such paradigms are of particular relevance in situating Blackburn’s singular contribution to the understanding of the slave systems of the modern world.

The first is the idea of the ‘Atlantic World’. Notably elaborated by Harvard’s Bernard Bailyn, this paradigm has proliferated across university departments in the us and Europe since the 1990s, generating an immense historiography and its own multi-disciplinary journal, Atlantic Studies, launched in 2004. Bailyn himself was a historian of colonial America who had made his name with a series of scrupulous studies of early New England merchants, 17th-century Virginia gentry and Massachusetts shipping bills, examining hundreds of 1770s pamphlets to produce his Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967).footnote¹ The intellectual flagship of the Atlantic History paradigm was the summer seminar that Bailyn led at Harvard between 1995 and 2010, with the full institutional backing of the university, including a dedicated website and a host of publications. The seminar attracted hundreds of young scholars from the four continents that ring the Atlantic Ocean and did a great deal to seed the Harvard paradigm more widely.footnote²

In his concise and characteristically elegant retrospective reconstruction of the field, written in 2005, Bailyn was unapologetic about situating the originating impulse of the Atlantic paradigm not in scholarly research but in the ‘public world’ of war-time propaganda.footnote³ Works by two well-connected journalists—Forrest Davis’s The Atlantic System (1941) and Walter Lippmann’s paean to the ‘Atlantic community’ in his us War Aims (1944)—helped pave the way for the promotion of post-war American interventionism, backed by the Atlantic Council and soon by a posse of anti-communist historians including Carlton Hayes, president of the American Historical Association, who began to treat the Atlantic region as a cultural whole. Thence the framing began to be used more broadly, especially by historians of the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet, Bailyn suggested, ‘wherever it appeared it expressed a growing sense, reflective of the Atlanticist climate of opinion, that the Atlantic World was a unit, historically as well as politically’.footnote⁴

The history of the Atlantic was also being examined from more heterodox perspectives. Although Bailyn was keen to insist that the paradigm owed nothing to Braudel’s conception of a Mediterranean world—any more than to an imperial history limited to the ‘two great thrusts’, Iberian and Anglo-Saxon—his Atlantic History was bound to acknowledge that the work of Annales scholars played an important part in foregrounding the ‘idea’ of that history, its emergence as a subject in itself, ‘a unit for discussion’.footnote⁵ The eleven-volume study of Séville et l’Atlantique (1955–59) by Pierre and Huguette Chaunu presented an Annales-style panorama of the Iberico-American world, analysing its structures and conjunctures. From another viewpoint, the Belgian historian Charles Verlinden traced the movement of slaves and sugar from the Mediterranean to the Americas in The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (1970) and set out to consider the significance of the Atlantic zone to world history in Les Origines de la Civilisation Atlantique (1966). As Chaunu noted, the clockwise circulation of winds and ocean currents, sweeping from West Africa to Brazil, from North America to Europe, and the vast riverine systems leading into the continental hinterlands, helped to integrate the Atlantic into a cohesive whole.footnote⁶

From the 1960s onwards, the expansion of historical research and international scholarly gatherings led to an upward ‘re-scaling of perspective’, Bailyn argued: ‘Large-scale spatial orbits developing through time were becoming visible as they had not been before.’footnote⁷ Ambitious works of political or economic history, such as R. R. Palmer’s two-volume The Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959/1964), or Philip Curtin’s ground-breaking analysis of shipping contracts and port data in The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1969), could be retrospectively accredited as milestones.footnote⁸ So too, in the field of intellectual history, Franco Venturi’s Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (1971) and J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment (1975) were recruited to Bailyn’s historiographical paradigm. By the 1980s, historians from many different backgrounds had converged in seeing the Atlantic as ‘the scene of a vast interaction’.footnote⁹ Nevertheless, Bailyn always insisted that the Atlantic World as a distinctive regional entity was the product of a particular epoch. Closely linked in the 17th and 18th centuries—and never more so than during the great political upheavals of 1776–1824—in the 19th century, the us, Europe, Latin America and West Africa took ‘different paths’, as they found their places within what he termed a new ‘global world system’.footnote¹⁰

If Bailyn’s paradigm was essentially spatial, albeit bounded in time, the contrasting proposal from the historical sociologist Dale Tomich was temporal and stadial, though delimited in space. While slavery played a relatively minor role (‘a tragic network’) in Atlantic History,footnote¹¹ in Tomich’s work it has been foregrounded. And while Bailyn fought shy of the Annales school, Tomich was deputy director of the Fernand Braudel Center at Binghamton, hired in 1976 by Immanuel Wallerstein, teaching there until his death last year, and developing his own critique of world-systems theory along the way.footnote¹² Another contrast: while Bailyn’s concept of the Atlantic World was essentially affirmative, following Lippmann, the starting point for Tomich’s new paradigm was a radical critique of late 19th-century bourgeois society’s complacent sense of itself as a beacon of moral and material progress for having done away with chattel slavery. This self-satisfaction reinforced the view, expressed by Smith and Marx as well, of slavery as the polar opposite of waged labour; a form of production that was not just inhumane but archaic and inefficient, too.footnote¹³

The presumption that slavery was incompatible with capitalism had persisted down to the present, Tomich wrote. Abolition was seen as a unilinear transition to economic modernity, with the corollary that wage labour was everywhere one thing, while slavery was everywhere another. Tomich challenged the assumption of slavery’s singularity, calling attention to its massive expansion and intensification on the big 19th-century plantations—a ‘second cycle’ of slavery, concomitant with the rise of British financial hegemony and speed-up of industrialization, urbanization and population growth, which had transformed the relations between periphery and core set in place by small-scale 18th-century colonialism. Loan capital from the City of London was a crucial factor in the post-1815 expansion of the world market, far beyond Britain’s formal empire, helping to establish a new world division of labour, dependent on and responsive to an integrated world market.footnote¹⁴