The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights

By Robin Blackburn

How slavery shaped the market economy and abolitionists gave us our ideals

The American Crucible furnishes a vivid and authoritative history of the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. For over three centuries enslavement promoted the rise of capitalism in the Atlantic world. The New World became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, colonial rebellion, slave witness and slave resistance. Slave produce raised up empires, fostered new cultures of consumption and financed the breakthrough to an industrial order.

Not until the stirrings of a revolutionary age in the 1780s was there the first public challenge to the ‘peculiar institution’. An anti-slavery alliance then set the scene for great acts of emancipation in Haiti in 1804, Britain in 1833–8, the United States in the 1860s, and Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s. In The American Crucible, Robin Blackburn argues that the anti-slavery movement forged many of the ideals we live by today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Verso
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781781685365

Robin Blackburn

Robin Blackburn teaches at the New School in New York and the University of Essex in the UK. He is the author of many books, including The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, Age Shock, Banking on Death, and The American Crucible.

Reviews for The American Crucible

[kcshankd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hemisphere-wide review of American slavery's rise and fall. A solid survey of the history of our peculiar institution. The chapters read mainly as stand-alone articles, as I am sure many originally were. That leads to some notable repetition, but the overall effort is strong. The penultimate chapter attempting to find a common thread to emancipation doesn't really, but at least the author forthrightly admits as much.