A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

James Walvin

Univ of California Press, Apr 19, 2022 - Business & Economics - 425 pages

A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world.
 
A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.
 
This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force, catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave labor lives on today.

What people are saying

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

User Review  - Publishers Weekly

Historian Walvin (Freedom: The Overthrow of the Slave Empires) asserts in this meticulous and eye-opening study that slavery was not just “fundamental to the way the West emerged,” but also “created ...

Contents

• The Scattering of People: 3
• Spanish Origins: 10
• Spain and the Other Slavery: 20
• Slavery Sugar and Power: 36
• People and Cargoes: 57
• Cargoes: 59
• The Dead: 88
• Internal Trades: 103
• Upheavals: 105
• Brazils Internal Slave Trade: 115
• The Domestic US Slave Trade: 125
• Accounting for Slavery: 143
• Managing Slavery: 175
• Brute Force: 191
• Working: 207
• Demanding Freedom: 223
• Demanding Freedom: 246
• A World Transformed: 273
• A World Transformed: 315
• Slavery Matters: 331
• Acknowledgements: 355
• Index: 367

About the author

James Walvin is Professor of History Emeritus at the University of York. He has published widely on modern social history and the history of slavery. He has held fellowships in Britain, the United States, Australia, and the Caribbean. In 2008 he was awarded the O.B.E. for his services to scholarship.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power
• Author: James Walvin
• Publisher: Univ of California Press, 2022
• ISBN: 0520386248, 9780520386242
• Length: 425 pages
• Subjects: Business & Economics / Economic History; Business & Economics / Globalization; History / Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies); History / World; Social Science / Slavery