Robin Blackburn's The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848
Foner, Eric
THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY 1776 1848, by Robin Blackburn. London and New York: Verso, 1988, 560 pp. Te finest body of historical writing to appear during the past twenty years has...
...Popular antislavery" linked abolition with anti-capitalist themes, especially fear that the British worker was losing his economic independence and becoming a "wage slave...
...Forty years ago Eric Williams proposed a simple economic explanation: After spawning the profits that fueled British industrialism, slavery had become economically unprofitable...
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...Blackburn places far more emphasis on respect for "property rights" than racism as a factor diminishing antislavery agitation...
...Major economic interests depended on the institution's stability, and even in the Age of Revolution a powerful ideology sustained it...
...Indeed, the reader would be well advised to read the last chapter first before plunging into the body of the text...
...These works have established beyond question the centrality of slavery to the Western hemisphere's settlement and development and to the rise and fall of European empires in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries...
...One form of private property was abolished, but the planters received over-generous compensation, with the working class footing the bill via a regressive tax system...
...London and New York: Verso, 1988, 560 pp...
...The book's strength is not new research— Blackburn's account rests on his extraordinary command of the secondary literature—but its broad scope and original, incisive conceptualization...
...Blackburn is certainly correct that by 1830 opposition to slavery was present in all classes, but those in power fixed the terms of emancipation...
...Slavery was powerfully entrenched in Cuba, the largest Caribbean island, and in the hemisphere's two largest nations, Brazil and the United States...
...Why did the British Parliament abolish slavery...
...An outpouring of exceptional studies by scholars in the United States, Brazil, Cuba, and other countries has transformed our understanding of issues ranging from slave life and culture to planter ideology and the economics of slavery...
...Slavery may have been profitable, he observes, but because of the industrial revolution, slave-grown crops represented a declining part of British commerce and thus the institution was increasingly vulnerable to attack...
...Blackburn's approach builds upon the arguments of Williams and Davis but moves well beyond them...
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...Yet the melancholy fact is that in 1848, when the book ends, far more slaves u•Pmmagmm STOPTI MT Of OWNIRI.P...
...In the detailed narrative of events in lands ranging from St...
...Robin Blackburn's The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery is not only the latest addition to this impressive body of literature but one of the finest studies of slavery and abolition to appear in many years...
...os WINTER • 1989 • 119 Books labored in the Western Hemisphere than in 1770...
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...Middle-class advocates of parliamentary reform pointed to abolition as the kind of measure the unreformed Parliament would not enact...
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...In 1833, abolition finally came to the British empire...
...Domingue and Brazil to England and France, the book's main themes sometimes recede from view— although they are effectively brought together in the final chapter...
...Further political conflict and violence lay ahead before abolition could be completed...
...But, Blackburn insists, support for abolition transcended class lines and its ideology was susceptible to divergent interpretations...
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...Subsequent research, however, demonstrated that slavery in much of the West Indies was still quite profitable in 1833...
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...and cotton played a role in international commerce perhaps even more significant than sugar once had...
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...Antislavery did form part of an effort by a new capitalist class to reinforce its legitimacy and mobilize popular support...
...In the 1970s David Brion Davis proposed the arresting thesis that abolition triumphed because it served the ideological interests of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie...
...The book does have its weaknesses...
...Slavery, Blackburn concludes, was abolished not for economic reasons, narrowly defined, but because "it became politically untenable...
...Slavery was abolished, but an apprenticeship system was introduced in an attempt to force blacks to remain as a disciplined plantation labor force...
...Only at moments of exceptional crisis—political revolts, slave rebellions, European revolutions, mass mobilizations for reform—did abolition become feasible...
...The fruit of many years of research and writing, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery is an impressive achievement...
...Many abolitionists supported the draconian changes in the poor law introduced at the same time as abolition, a law that eliminated public relief outside of workhouses, but for others, emancipation was an example of how economic relations could be regulated by the state and judged by moral rather than strictly economic standards...
...the geographical area they cultivated had expanded tremendously...
...To explain the fate of slavery in individual colonies, he examines the nature of the planter class, the impact of antislavery ideology, political developments and class conflicts within the relevant metropolitan power, and—a factor often ignored by previous students of abolition—the struggles of the slaves to free themselves...
...This question has long bedeviled historians...
...It took severe social and political crises to shake slavery's foundations...
...Anti-slavery," in other words, "had an appeal for all classes," not just the bourgeoisie...
...Te finest body of historical writing to appear during the past twenty years has probably been produced by students of slavery and emancipation...
...For all its limitations, Blackburn insists, abolition was a major achievement...
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...WINTER • 1989 • 117 Books explosive within Britain...
...Crisscrossing the Atlantic, Blackburn welds events both in the centers of empire and the slave-based colonies of the New World into a coherent narrative...
...THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY 1776 1848, by Robin Blackburn...
...Equally important, he shows how the social, economic, and political changes unleashed by the Age of Revolution had a contradictory impact on slavery, strengthening it in some places while leading to abolition in others...
...And if prevailing economic interests did not inspire abolition, they did not lose much by it...
...By isolating one form of labor exploitation as uniquely repellent, it in effect sanctified the capitalist wage system as a form of "freedom," locating social injustice outside British society rather than within...
...As calm returned in the 1820s, antislavery rose again, its demands made more insistent by an outbreak of slave revolts in the British West Indies...
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Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
