内容简介
In one form or another, slavery has existed throughout theworld for millennia. It helped to change the world, and the worldtransformed the institution. In the 1450s, when Europeans from thesmall corner of the globe least enmeshed in the institution firstinteracted with peoples of other continents, they created, in theAmericas, the most dynamic, productive, and exploitative system ofcoerced labor in human history. Three centuries later these sameintercontinental actions produced a movement that successfullychallenged the institution at the peak of its dynamism. Withinanother century a new surge of European expansion constructed OldWorld empires under the banner of antislavery. However,twentieth-century Europe itself was inundated by a new system ofslavery, larger and more deadly than its earlier system of NewWorld slavery. This book examines these dramatic expansions andcontractions of the institution of slavery and the impact ofviolence, economics, and civil society in the ebb and flow ofslavery and antislavery during the last five centuries.