The history of Atlantic slavery poses fundamental questions about the origins of the present age. What is the relation between the toppling of British, French and Spanish colonial empires in the Americas, during the great revolutionary wave of 1776–1824, and the abolition of the slave plantations they had nurtured? Why did the three surviving slave systems—in the us, Cuba and Brazil—then experience a second lease of life in the 19th century? What role did coerced African labour play in the expansion of capitalism as a mode of production? Why were these ‘late’ slaveries overthrown when they were—and what legacies did their abolition produce?

These questions have been at the heart of Robin Blackburn’s career-spanning series on chattel slavery in the Americas. In The Making of New World Slavery (1997), he described the piecemeal growth of the system: the sugar plantations developed in the 15th–16th century Mediterranean basin, using a mixed local workforce of peasants and labourers; their introduction to the Atlantic islands by the ‘precociously’ naval-mercantile Portuguese, who soon supplied West African slaves to work them, in the name of bringing souls to Christ; the 17th-century take-off, as French, Dutch and English merchantmen and colonial settlers established a trade in sub-tropical crops across the Caribbean islands and down the Chesapeake coast, importing indentured servants and African slaves for the heavy labour. Portuguese planters took sugar cane to Brazil; Spanish colonists imported Africans to bulk up the workforce in Mexico and Peru. These plantation economies flourished under the jealous protection of the imperial powers, which commanded their products for processing and resale in the home market—colonial mercantilism, in Adam Smith’s phrase—with the French and English also muscling into the slave trade; African merchant princes established their own fortified trading posts along the Gold Coast to meet the growing demand.footnote¹

Plantation-produced commodities—sugar, coffee, tobacco, and soon, cotton used in garments that would replace wool and worsted ones—helped to stimulate new patterns of consumption in 18th-century Europe, not least in the fast-growing English market, where landowning gentry and yeoman farmers were reaping the rewards of an innovatory agrarian capitalism. The rate of return on the colonial slave plantations outstripped all other investments, and customs revenues on the trade helped fund an expanding navy. For Blackburn, this innovation-prodding capital was, as he would later put it, a ‘germ’ of capitalist development, landing in a pre-capitalist form. But, he argued in The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848, the colonial-mercantilist forms proved politically vulnerable, even at the height of their economic growth. Power struggles between the rival European empires, Britain, France and Spain, opened opportunities for colonial settlers dissatisfied with imperial restrictions, and rifts between slave-owners and the colonial authorities offered prospects for slave revolt. Though contestations of empire and slavery were, in principle, distinct political projects, in this period ‘they became intertwined’.footnote²

The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery analyses the successive revolutionary upsurges, from the American Declaration of Independence, the French Revolution and the birth of Haiti to the 1811–24 overthrow of the Spanish-imperial infrastructure in Latin America by the colonists themselves, amid slave revolts and Indian uprisings. It provides a vivid account of the revolutionaries’ thought-worlds, as well as their political battles and the economic underpinnings of the social formations in which they struggled, with memorable portraits of Bolívar, San Martín, Toussaint and Dessalines. In Blackburn’s account, which draws on the earlier work of C. L. R. James, the Haitian Revolution and its reception in Jacobin Paris is the hinge on which this period turns. In January 1794, delegates from St Domingue—a black freedman, a mulatto and a white colonist—were greeted with rapturous applause at the National Convention, which immediately decreed the abolition of slavery in all French colonies, declaring that all men there, without distinction of colour, were French citizens and enjoyed all the rights assured under the Constitution. The decree of Pluviôse was celebrated at the Temple of Reason, formerly known as Notre-Dame, with many citizens of colour in attendance. Copies of the decree and other revolutionary documents spread through the Caribbean and beyond; slave and maroon revolts erupted in Guadeloupe, Jamaica, St Vincent, Grenada, Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil. For a brief but vital period, Blackburn noted, ‘the programme of radical abolitionism was fuelled by slave rebellion and sponsored by a major power.’footnote³

Blackburn’s latest book, The Reckoning, picks up the story for the three cases, the us, Brazil and Cuba, where slave regimes emerged strengthened from these revolutionary upheavals.footnote⁴ In 1800, he points out, there were a million African slaves in the us, the most advanced of these powers; by 1860, they numbered 4 million. The Reckoning tracks the role of slave-plantation owners in driving us territorial expansion in the early 19th century—fanning out across the Mississippi Basin after Jefferson clinched the Louisiana Purchase in 1803—and the crucial part played by Northern finance in boosting the slavocracy, guaranteed a disproportionate role in government by the Founding Fathers. The slave plantation came late to Cuba, the island stepping up in the early 1800s to take over sugar production from Haiti, where former slaves were now free subsistence farmers; the Hispano-Cuban elite stayed loyal to Spain, which supplied a formidable garrison and naval power to oversee the illegal import of half a million newly enslaved Africans to its ‘ever-faithful isle’. Brazil’s slave plantations, dating to the 17th century, suffered from the backwardness of an early mover: more resilient, through deep embedding in the ‘natural economy’—with some slaves entirely occupied with producing food and goods for their own use—but also more resistant to modernization. Yet here too a ‘second slavery’ expanded as colonial mercantilism foundered in the Napoleonic Wars and Britain, with global naval hegemony secured, switched to the banner of free trade.

The Reckoning then traces the paths to abolition in each case, with their different combinations of slave revolt or flight, elite fracture and moral-ideological abolitionism. In the us, where the expanded plantation system offered the worst prospects for slave revolt, amid a larger, well-armed white population backed by local vigilantes and state power, Blackburn argues that it took ‘a crack in the social formation’ to open new opportunities for abolition. The prospect of competition for the vast new territories acquired in 1848 by war with Mexico, stretching to the El Dorado of California itself, animated a spontaneous Northern homesteading reaction against the plantation owners of the South, who would surely import slaves to mine the gold. As party ties linking North and South began to fray in the 1850s, homesteaders and abolitionists, themselves a minority, made common cause. But for The Reckoning, the Civil War was the decisive step: the Emancipation Proclamation was finally issued in early 1863 as a war measure, aiming to pull the rug of slave labour from under the Southern economy and block recognition of the Confederacy by Britain and France. In the final months of the War, the Confederates themselves began freeing male slaves on military grounds.footnote⁵

The egalitarian vision of radical abolitionism was voided after the War. Once the Southern oligarchy had accepted its subaltern status, the Northern bourgeoisie called a halt to expropriation. Economic pressures and the vigilante terror of Confederate veterans helped to impose a new form of subordination on the black population of the South, while the homesteaders’ small-capitalist dreams were overtaken by land speculation, robber-baron capitalism and imperial expansion. Yet the liberatory charge of slave emancipation in the us did resonate beyond its shores, helping to unleash abolition in Cuba and Brazil. In all three cases, Blackburn concludes, the dismantling of the slave regime was favoured by, and itself promoted, a crisis of the whole social order—war, secession, slave flights and revolts, the crumbling of the slaveholder ideology. The fact that slavery itself was saturated with everyday violence made a purely pacifist liberation impossible—and cast a long shadow over the generations ahead.footnote⁶