Why did the slave trade and slavery cease in some regions of the Atlantic world and consolidate in others during the revolutionary era, 1776-1848? Robin Blackburn tries to answer this question in his avowedly Marxist narrative of these “liberation struggles.” His aim determines the structure of the book, as he seeks to measure how far the antislavery movement “transcended the bourgeois democratic or capitalist dynamic” (p. 27). Did crises “in the mode of political domination” (p. 4) create aftershocks in the social regime that caused slavery to collapse? If they did, why did this process occur in some countries and not in others? Blackburn’s questions are important and challenging; his answers are less convincing.
Following a survey of colonial slavery on the eve of the revolutionary epoch, Blackburn analyzes both the colonial and metropolitan political struggles in a country-by-country account of the fate of slavery in each of the slave areas of the Atlantic world. The narrative is wide-ranging and well written. Blackburn roots his story within the broader political and economic changes occurring on both sides of the Atlantic. His Marxist mold, however, is an overly procrustean frame to encompass all the campaigns against the slave trade and slavery. There is also an unresolved ambiguity in the book’s title. The histories of Brazil and the United States in the nineteenth century demonstrate that slavery and antislavery cannot be confined within political colonialism. In contrast, Blackburn argues that in Saint-Domingue the abolition of slavery destroyed both monarchy and colonialism. He acknowledges contradictions in the destruction of “colonial slavery,” but his explanation does not fully resolve them.
His thesis is that the slave trade and slavery did not crumble for economic reasons, but that instead slavery wilted in places “where it became politically untenable” (p. 520) when “stormy class struggles” in both the colonies and the metropolis forced abolition onto the government’s agenda. Even if there is an intriguing correlation between political crises and the rise of antislavery in the Atlantic world, except during the American Revolution when proslavery forces consolidated their position in the U.S. South, is the success of the antislavery movement due solely to class struggles? Paradoxically, Blackburn’s admirable account of the background to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 brings into focus the interrelated political, strategic, and economic elements of that decision, but in a way that calls into question whether one overriding thesis is an adequate historical explanation. His narrative does succeed in identifying “the cumulative character of the challenge to colonial slavery” (p. 525), the building-block idea that each advance in some way built upon its predecessors.
Blackburn offers many shrewd and revealing insights about the nature of the antislavery movements in this long volume, especially regarding the role played by the slaves themselves. He confronts his readers with an intellectually provocative explanation of the watershed historical transition from slavery to antislavery, but, as he admits at the end of the book, his conclusions “remain partial and provisional” (p. 549), at least until he can complete his account of the destruction of slavery in a second volume. The abolition of slavery in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil awaits this sequel. Blackburn anticipates his argument in volume 2 when he states “that colonialism, monarchism, racism and slavery itself were only contingent superstructures upon capitalist relations of production" (p. 544).
The larger questions of why the slave trade and slavery ended in the Americas in this era still beckon the historian even as the answers multiply in number and complexity. Whether historians will ever find one overall explanation that will fit everything together is still open for debate. Robin Blackburn believes he has unlocked the puzzle with his Marxist key.
