A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin

Abstract

Walvin’s concise review of slavery in the Atlantic argues that slavery has transformed the West or, indeed, the world to the present day. Chapters in six sections include overviews of Iberian and northern European slave systems, examples from the Middle Passage, slave trade within Brazil and the United States, “managing slavery,” the campaign for freedom, and the argument about the world transformed by slavery—as seen through sugar, tobacco, servile labor, and plantation economies. Walvin’s purpose for writing the book was to restate the history of slavery in support of the discourse around Black Lives Matter.The book’s most original observations are signaled at the opening of the concluding chapter: “The furore which swept round the globe in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought slavery back into widespread public debate.” In Walvin’s words, “Critics everywhere were swift to point out that the origins of that injustice lay deep in the history of relations between Black and white … [and] the history of slavery” (331). As he suggests, public discourse turns to history when the issues become most painful and difficult.Walvin argues that the intensity of the reaction to Floyd’s death was reinforced by an earlier debate. “The 1619 Project,” a series published in New York Times Magazine, appeared in 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the delivery of African captives to Virginia.1 These essays, which reviewed U.S. history through the lens of slavery, prompted heated discussion among Americans of varied backgrounds, but they made virtually no reference to history outside the United States. Walvin argues, however, that this renewed interest in U.S. slavery ignited a global debate that linked police violence worldwide to reminders of social inequity, to statues of imperial generals, and to the wealth garnered by powerful families and institutions from the work of forced laborers.Having argued that statements about the past of slavery and inequality need to be updated, Walvin turns to the historical background underlying the explosion of Black Lives Matter. He begins with World War II, in which people from all over the world fought the Axis powers, after which the inhabitants of colonies were able to claim the rights of national citizens. He acknowledges that the U.S. civil-rights movement of that era performed a similar function: “In the USA, the reconstruction of the Black past lifted slavery out of its essentially regional setting.”Walvin’s perspective on the British Empire reaffirms the argument that the slavery/inequality debate is worldwide, not just American. Walvin shows how children born to immigrant parents in Europe found that their school curriculum did not address their family or national background. Educators had to address the issue of whether a history of Europe were even possible without looking at slavery. In ex-colonial countries, the inherited imperial school curriculum was inflected by a study of national rights and independence, relying on national scholars to explain the contrasts of wealth and poverty. Walvin mentions James and Williams for the Caribbean cases.2 In both the United States and overseas, expanding studies of slavery brought new disciplines to historical study—linguistics, archaeology, and expanded digital analysis.Walvin refers ambivalently to both West and world as the locus of slavery’s transformation. Thus, “for centuries, the Western world at large was inextricably entangled with slavery.” But his sense of the underlying dynamic is clear. The spreading realization of the global ubiquity of slavery and its effects begged two inescapable questions: “Why were we not told?” and “How had Europeans become the Lords of Human Kind?” (336, 343). In fact, preceding research, especially in the last fifty years, had deeply documented slavery. Evidence was plentiful, but many saw it as new. Such is the interplay of scholars and communities.Finally, given the insistent question of what would be a fair response to the end of slavery, Walvin addresses reparations, focusing especially on the website that reveals details of payments to British owners of slaves in the 1830s (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs). The discussion is evidently continuing. At the institutional level, banks and universities have made compensatory payments in recognition of their earlier profits from slavery. Walvin concludes the book with a rhetorical question: “Who could now deny that slavery matters?” (354).