Abolition A History of Slavery and Antislavery [Paperback]

This book examines the impact of violence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow of slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.Slavery has helped to change the world, and the world has transformed the institution. From the 1450s, when Europeans first interacted with peoples of other continents to create the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history, to the twentieth century, where a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than before, has inundated Europe, this book examines the impact of violence, economics, and civil society on slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.Slavery has helped to change the world, and the world has transformed the institution. From the 1450s, when Europeans first interacted with peoples of other continents to create the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history, to the twentieth century, where a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than before, has inundated Europe, this book examines the impact of violence, economics, and civil society on slavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout the world for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the world transformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from the small corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution first interacted with peoples of other continents, they created, in the Americas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system of coerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these same intercontinental actions produced a movement that successfully challenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Within another century a new surge of European expansion constructed Old World empires under the banner of antislavery. However, twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system of slavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system oló·