Abolition: A History Of Slavery And Antislavery
by Seymour Drescher /
2009 / English / EPUB
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In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world
for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world
transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the
small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first
interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the
Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of
coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same
intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully
challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within
another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old
World empires under the banner of antislavery. However,
twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of
slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of New
World slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions and
contractions of the institution of slavery and the impact of
violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of
slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.
In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world
for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world
transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the
small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first
interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the
Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of
coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same
intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully
challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within
another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old
World empires under the banner of antislavery. However,
twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of
slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of New
World slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions and
contractions of the institution of slavery and the impact of
violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of
slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.
