Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System

Description

The inclusion of the New World in the international economy, among the most important events in modern history, was based on slavery. Europeans brought at least eight million black men, women and children out of Africa to the Western Hemisphere between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and slavery transformed the Atlantic into a complex trading area. This trade united North and South America, Europe, and Africa through the movement of peoples, goods and services, credit and capital. The essays in this book place slavery in the mainstream of modern history. They describe the transfer of slavery from the Old World, its role in forging the interdependence of the economies bordering the Atlantic, its effect on the empires of Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain, and its impact on Africa.

'The great virtue of this 'Atlantic system' approach is that it forces American historians, in particular, to sidestep the exceptionalism that bedevils their historiography and to confront the fact that slavery is a part of the history of the Atlantic and not just of what later became their own nation-state. It is also the focus on the Atlantic world that gives this collection of pieces covering an enormous geographical area a coherence that is unusual in conference proceedings.' Georgia Historical Quarterly