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A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped the modern world. How Slavery in the Americas Matters 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. How Slavery in the Americas Matters 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

People as things: The slave trade -- Sinews of empire: Africans and the making of American empires -- Slave defiance -- The slave owners' nightmare: Haiti -- The Friends of Black Freedom -- Freeing Britain's slaves -- The fall of US slavery -- The end of slavery in the Spanish empire -- The last to go: Brazil -- Abolition in the wider world -- Slavery in the modern age -- Conclusion.

"The British role in the shaping of the African diaspora was central: the British carried more Africans across the Atlantic than any other nation and their colonial settlements in the Caribbean and North America absorbed vast numbers of Africans. The crops produced by those slaves helped to lay the foundations for Western material well-being, and their associated cultural habits helped to shape key areas of Western sociability that survive to this day. Britain was also central in the drive to end slavery, in her own possessions and elsewhere in the world. Making the Black Atlantic presents a coherent story of Britain's role in the African diaspora, its origins, progress, and transformation."--Bloomsbury Publishing

How did a simple commodity, once the prized monopoly of kings and princes, become an essential ingredient in the lives of millions, before mutating yet again into the cause of a global health epidemic? Prior to 1600, sugar was a costly luxury, the domain of the rich. But with the rise of the sugar colonies in the New World over the following century, sugar became cheap, ubiquitous and an everyday necessity. Less than fifty years ago, few people suggested that sugar posed a global health problem. And yet today, sugar is regularly denounced as a dangerous addiction, on a par with tobacco. . . . Acclaimed historian James Walvin looks at the history of our collective sweet tooth, beginning with the sugar grown by enslaved people who had been uprooted and shipped vast distances to undertake the grueling labor on plantations. The combination of sugar and slavery would transform the tastes of the Western world"--dust jacket

Slavery in small things: slavery and modern cultural habits isthe first book to explore the long-range cultural legacy of slavery through commonplace daily objects. Offers a new and original approach to the history of slavery by an acknowledged expert on the topic Traces the relationship between slavery and modern cultural habits through an analysis of commonplace objects that include sugar, tobacco, tea, maps, portraiture, print, and more

Slavery transformed Africa, Europe and the Americas and hugely-enhanced the well-being of the West but the subject of slavery can be hard to understand because of its huge geographic and chronological span. This book uses a unique atlas format to present the story of slavery, explaining its historical importance and making this complex story and its geographical setting easy to understand.

The years between 1776 and 1851 are of profound importance for the social and urban historian. English town dwellers of the period experienced some fundamental changes in their way of life: rapid population growth; and an unprecedented rate of social change resulting from this. These ever-increasing armies of town dwellers presented the local and central authorities with a myriad of urgent problems, including those of feeding, housing and controlligni a turbulent populace. These years saw the emergence of a new, essentially modern, machinery of control for running an urban society. Despite the

On November 29, 1781, Captain Collingwood of the British ship Zong commanded his crew to throw overboard one-third of his cargo: a shipment of Africans bound for slavery in America. This book examines the deplorable killings on the Zong, the lawsuit that ensued, and how the murder of 132 slaves affected debates about slavery