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The American Crucible:
Slavery, Emancipation and
Human Rights, By Robin Blackburn
Friday, 24 June 2011
If the thousands of historians who have written about Atlantic slavery and its abolition, only a handful have ever given us a really original perspective on that vast subject. Even fewer have proposed a satisfying, or stimulating, general theory about it, an attempt at explaining the rise, fall and enduring consequences of the entire New World slave system across the centuries and continents. Robin Blackburn is prominent – even pre-eminent – among those few. He has tackled the task in a formidable body of work beginning in the late 1980s; but in a rather idiosyncratic way.
He began, in 1988, with The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, then moved backwards to analyse the origins of the system whose demise he had already dissected, in The Making of New World Slavery in 1997. Now, in The American Crucible, he broadens the focus still further, surveying the whole career of modern slave systems from the 16th century to near the end of the 19th, embracing not only their demise in the British and French colonial worlds, but also the later course of abolition in Cuba and Brazil. It's too rarely remembered that slavery there only ended in 1886 and 1888 respectively.
Thus we can now see the three books, Overthrow, Making and Crucible, as a trilogy, a coherent and imposing unity – albeit not one apparently pre-planned. The achievement and originality lie in Blackburn's insistence on the crucial interrelation among slavery, colonialism and capitalism, seeking to map the different modes of production, of colonisation, and of enslavement on to one another. New World slavery was, Blackburn urges, a product – a central, not incidental, one – of the rise of capitalist modernity.
Insisting on the word "capitalist" here is not an empty political gesture, or a vague bow to Blackburn's Marxist background. However much Blackburn's work draws from and debates with a range of theorists and historians, including some conservative ones, he continues to maintain the indispensability of Marx's central insights.
Equally, the stress on modernity is not – as in so much social theory and political rhetoric – some contentless invocation of things-in-general-since-whenever, but an important reminder that even in their last stages, New World slave systems and their defenders were not archaic throwbacks but dynamic forces.
Not only was slavery at the heart of early modernity, but it was crucial to the global growth of commerce and industry. The argument first developed in the 1930s by Eric Williams, that profits from the New World plantations drove Britain's industrial revolution, has been much criticised if not wholly overturned ever since. Blackburn concedes that it can now be upheld only in radically modified form. Nonetheless, it was in the plantations of the Americas at least as much as the factories of Old or New England that contemporary forms of labour organisation and discipline were pioneered.
Among slaveholders and their apologists, seemingly antiquated ideologies of paternalism coexisted with innovation and experimentation, in warring contradictions. Their opponents too – whether white abolitionists or rebellious slaves – espoused an ever-shifting mix of ideas. Some strove to recover a lost past of imagined freedom, some upheld ideas of "free labour" - which to their critics like Marx simply meant substituting wage slavery for the chattel kind. Only a few believed in universal liberty, let alone human and racial equality.
It follows near-inevitably that there was no smooth or preordained progress towards general liberty, but a "spiral path" with partial and ambiguous victories, bloody setbacks, mixed motives, and clashing blocs of economic and social power. Emancipation came only through or after revolution – Blackburn's fourth keyword alongside capitalism, colonialism, and slavery itself – or, as in North America, through cataclysmic civil war.
Here Blackburn follows recent work by historians like Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Laurent Dubois, who have argued for a dramatic reappraisal of the significance of the Haitian revolution in the 1790s. However miserable Haiti's post-independence fate may seem – a story of poverty, dictatorship, instability, disaster both natural and man-made – it was in many ways just as important as America's and France's immediately preceding upheavals. In winning their freedom, Haiti's slaves, unlike American or French revolutionaries and equally unlike all but a tiny minority of European abolitionists, placed truly egalitarian ideals firmly on a global agenda.
There they remain, still contested, still to be attained – and not only because of the multiple forms of bondage and unfree labour which, as Blackburn rightly reminds us, persist and even proliferate today. The new conceptions of human rights and democracy forged in the era of Atlantic revolution and abolition continue to challenge us, from Detroit to Damascus to Dorking.
So Blackburn reconnects his historical argument with the contemporary political concerns which have always energised his other career as veteran New Left activist. His interpretation of Atlantic slavery and its end intertwines with current debates on democracy and discourses of human rights. Some of those connections are more disturbing than affirmative, challenging the acquisitive individualism of much "rights talk", or showing how the rhetoric of liberation can be betrayed in the service of power. This is perhaps the least fully developed of Blackburn's diverse arguments. His remarks on recent writings about human rights by figures like Samuel Moyn, Regis Debray and Slavoj Zizek seem almost like hastily inserted afterthoughts – but at least underlines that The American Crucible poses a challenge for the political future as well as a bold reappraisal of the historical past.
Stephen Howe is professor of post-colonial history and culture at Bristol University
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Hardback, 512 pages
ISBN: 9781844675692
May 2011
$34.95 / £20.00
The American Crucible:
Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights
A landmark history of the rise, abolition, and legacy of slavery in the New World.
This book furnishes a panoramic view of slavery and emancipation in the Americas from the conquests and colonization of the sixteenth century to the ‘century of abolition’ that stretched from 1780 to 1888. Tracing the diverse responses of African captives, The American Crucible argues that while slave rebels and abolitionists made real gains, they also suffered cruel setbacks and disappointments, leading to a momentous radicalization of the discourse of human rights.
In it, Robin Blackburn explains the emergence of ferocious systems of racial exploitation while rejecting the comforting myths that portray emancipation as somehow already inscribed in the institutions and ideas that allowed for, or even fostered, racial slavery in the first place, whether the logic of the market, the teachings of religion, or the spirit of nationalism. Rather, Blackburn stresses, American slavery was novel—and so too were the originality and achievement of the anti-slavery alliances which eventually destroyed it. The Americas became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement and emancipation. The exotic commodities produced by the slave plantations helped to transform Europe and North America, raising up empires and stimulating industrial revolution and ‘market revolution’ to bring about the pervasive commodification of polite society, work and everyday life in parts of Europe and North America. Fees, salaries and wages fostered consuming habits so that capitalism, based on free wage labor in the metropolis, became intimately dependent on racial slavery in the New World. But by the late eighteenth century the Atlantic boom had sown far and wide the seeds of subversion, provoking colonial rebellion, slave conspiracy and popular revolt, the aspirations of a new black peasantry and ‘picaresque proletariat’, and the emergence of a revolutionary doctrine: the ‘rights of man’. The result was a radicalization of the principles of the Enlightenment, with the Haitian Revolution rescuing and reshaping the ideals memorably proclaimed by the American and French revolutions. Blackburn charts the gradual emergence of an ability and willingness to see the human cost of the heedless consumerism and to challenge it. The anti-slavery idea, he argues, brought together diverse impulses—the ‘free air’ doctrine maintained by the common people of Europe, the critique of the philosophes and the urgency of slave resistance and black witness. The anti-slavery idea made gains thanks to a succession of historic upheavals. But the remaining slave systems—in the US South, Cuba and Brazi—were in many ways as strong as ever. They were only overturned thanks to the momentous clashes unleashed by the American Civil War, Cuba’s fight for independence and the terminal crisis of the Brazilian Empire.>via: http://www.versobooks.com/books/126-the-american-crucible