NEW BOOK: THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE: SLAVERY, EMANCIPATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS
BY ROBIN BLACKBURN
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LAUNCH EVENTS FOR THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE THROUGHOUT JUNE AND JULY:
Tuesday June 14, 2011, 6:30pm
At the British Library Conference Centre, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB
‘Robin Blackburn: Legacies of Emancipation in the Americas’
with Richard Drayton, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Bonnie Greer
Robin Blackburn (Essex University), Richard Drayton (King's College London), Denise Ferreira da Silva (Queen Mary, University of London), and playwright and critic Bonnie Greer explore the long-term legacies of the processes of emancipation of enslaved African populations that began in the late eighteenth century in different parts of the Americas.
This event is co-sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.
For more information and to RSVP:
http://www.versobooks.com/events/140-robin-blackburn-legacies-of-emancipation-in-the-americas
Thursday June 16, 2011, 1:15pm
At the National Portrait Gallery, Ondaatje Wing Theatre, St Martin’s Place, London WC2H 0HE
‘The American Crucible: Slavery, abolition and anti-slavery in America’
Historian of slavery Robin Blackburn looks at the role of slavery, abolition and anti-slavery in America, 150 years after the Civil War, with reference to the key activists in Benjamin Robert Haydon's The Anti-Slavery Convention 1840 currently on display in Room 20.
For more information visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/events/176-the-american-crucible
Monday July 04, 2011, 7:00pm
At the London Review Bookshop 14 Bury Place, London WC1A 2JL
‘Robin Blackburn: The Revolutionary Origin of Human Rights?’
Launching The American Crucible and An Unfinished Revolution
In this discussion Robin Blackburn will talk about the belated and difficult history of 'general liberty' in the Age of Revolution, from 1776 – when, on 4 July, the US Declaration of Independence was adopted by Congress – to the Haitian Republic. His new book, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (Verso) is a panoramic history that builds on his previous work on slavery and anti-slavery, linking them to the overall evolution of society, culture and economy in and beyond the Atlantic World; in it he argues that the struggles of slave rebels and abolitionists brought about a radicalization of the principles of the enlightenment, with the Haitian Revolution rescuing and reshaping the ideals proclaimed by the American and French revolutions. Robin Blackburn is Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and a former editor of New Left Review.
For more information and to RSVP visit:
http://www.lrbshop.co.uk/home.php?cat=37
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THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE 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 labour 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.
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“A marvellous book—insightful and stimulating—which boldly links the expansion of human rights to Marxist and related views of economic development.” – Dr Stanley Engerman, University of Rochester, NY and and author of TIME ON THE CROSS: THE ECONOMICS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
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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 SLAVER, AGE SHOCK, BANKING ON DEATH, and THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE.
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ISBN: 978 1 84467 569 2 / $34.95 / £20.00/ Hardcover / 512 pages
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For more information about THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE or to buy the book visit:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/126-the-american-crucible
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