Daniel Rood's The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery looks into the transformations of slavery in the New World—especially in Cuba, Brazil, and the US South—following the Haitian Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, and the gradual antislavery turn of the British Empire. It argues that the institution “did not simply drift toward dissolution” but rather “migrated to new places and incorporated new kinds of industrial technologies” (p. 2). This picture accords well with the view of scholars who describe such a transformation as the second slavery. Responding to a new moment in the history of world capitalism, plantation experts played a key role in this process, developing technologies suitable to the tropical environments of the greater Caribbean and the southern Atlantic. However, the book also stresses the contributions that slaves and freed people made to the development of these technologies, which revolutionized the production and transportation of plantation commodities across...

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