Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery during the Nineteenth Century

This volume grew out of a 2016 conference on “politics, economy, and the second slavery” at Binghamton University's Fernand Braudel Center and is dedicated to the memory of Christopher Schmidt-Nowara. It is a heterogeneous collection with a brief preface and eight chapters mostly centered on expanding the analysis of the second slavery, a concept popularized by Dale Tomich that concentrates on slavery (and abolition) in late developing plantation economies like Brazil, Cuba, and the United States that combined bound workers with the nineteenth-century technology of the Industrial Revolution. Here the authors grapple with the tensions between economically liberal ideology, capitalism, and slavery in what Tomich terms a “complex and contradictory modernity” while extending the purview of the second slavery perspective to new areas like Hispaniola, Gran Colombia, and Panama (p. xi). The authors also address inter-European rivalries and the interaction of Atlantic and local forces, ideologies, and mentalities. In addition,...