Author: Robin Blackburn File Type: pdf At the time when European powers colonized the Americas, the institution of slavery had almost disappeared from Europe itself. Having overcome an institution widely regarded as oppressive, why did they sponsor the construction of racial slavery in their new colonies? Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from medieval times to the early modern epoch, and finds that the stigmatization of the ethno-religious Other was given a callous twist by a new culture of consumption, freed from an earlier moral economy. The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state soughtsuccessfullyto batten on this commerce, andunsuccessfullyto regulate slavery and race. Successive chapters of the book consider the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Each are shown to have contributed something to the eventual consolidation of racial slavery and to the plantation revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is shown that plantation slavery emerged from the impulses of civil society rather than from the strategies of the individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, premised on the killing toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West. The Making of New World Slavery argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state soughtsuccessfullyto feed upon this commerce andwith markedly less successto regulate slavery and racial relations. To illustrate this thesis, Blackburn examines the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Plantation slavery is shown to have emerged from the impulses of civil society, not from the strategies of individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. Finally, he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, predicated on the murderous toil of the plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.**From Library JournalIn his companion volume to The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (Routledge, 1988), Blackburn, editor of the New Left Review, traces the development of slavery in the New World. He argues that independent traders and businessmen intent on capitalizing on the birth of consumer societies were the driving force behind the rise of the Atlantic slave trade and the sustenance of the plantation system. Thus, although early-modern European states endorsed and profited from slavery, private commercial interests are held primarily responsible for the cruelties of slave traffic and the inhumane conditions of the plantation. In his extremely well-researched and readable book, the author also explains how an emerging racial consciousness was used to legitimize New World slavery and how the plantation contributed to the industrial and military success of the United States and Europe. Highly recommended for academic collections.?Raymond J. Palin, St. Thomas Univ., Miami, Fla. 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. ReviewBlackburns book has finally drawn the veil which concealed or made mysterious the history and development of modem society.Darcus Howe, Guardian A magnificent work of contemporary scholarship.Eric Foner, The Nation Sombre, dark and masterly.Linda Colley, Independent on Sunday An exhaustive, powerfully written and compelling book.Anthony Pagden, Times Literary Supplement p text-align justify Extremely well-researched and readable ... . Highly recommended.Raymond J. Palin, Library Journal

Author: Dorothy Thompson File Type: pdf

Author: T. J. Tallie File Type: pdf How were indigenous social practices deemed queer and aberrant by colonial forces? In Queering Colonial Natal , T.J. Tallie travels to colonial Natalestablished by the British in 1843, today South Africas KwaZulu-Natal provinceto show how settler regimes queered indigenous practices. Defining them as threats to the normative order they sought to impose, they did so by delimiting Zulu polygamy restricting alcohol access, clothing, and even friendship and assigning only Europeans to government schools. Using queer and critical indigenous theory, this book critically assesses Natal (where settlers were to remain a minority) in the context of the global settler colonial project in the nineteenth century to yield a new and engaging synthesis. Tallie explores the settler colonial history of Natals white settlers and how they sought to establish laws and rules for both whites and Africans based on European mores of sexuality and gender. At the same time, colonial archives reveal that many African and Indian people challenged such civilizational claims. Ultimately Tallie argues that the violent collisions between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in Natal shaped the conceptions of race and gender that bolstered each groups claim to authority.

Author: Ash Amin File Type: pdf In Architectures of Knowledge, Ash Amin and Patrick Cohendet argue that the time is right for research to explore the relationship between two other dimensions of knowledge in order to explain the innovative performance of firms between knowledge that is possessed and knowledge that is practiced generally within communities of like-minded employees in a firm. The impetus behind this argument is both conceptual and empirical. Conceptually, there is a need to explore the interaction of knowledge that firms possess in the form of established competencies of stored memory, with the knowing that occurs in distributed communities through the conscious and unconscious acts of social interaction. Empirically, the impetus comes from the challenge faced by firms to the hierarchically defined architecture that bring together specialized units of ((possessed)) knowledge and the distributed and always unstable architecture of knowledge that draws on the continuously changing capacity of interpretation among actors. In this book, these questions of the dynamics of innovatinglearning through practices of knowing, and the management of the interface between transactional and knowledge imperatives, are approached in a cross-disciplinary and empirically grounded manner. The book is the synthesis of an innovative encounter between a socio-spatial theorist and an economist. The book results from the delicate interplay between two very different epistemologies and consequent positions, but which progressively converged towards what is hoped to be a novel vision. The book begins by explaining why knowledge is becoming more of a core element of the value- generating process in the economy, then juxtaposes the economic and cognitive theorizations of knowledge in firms with pragmatic and socially grounded theorizations and a critical exploration of the neglected dimension of the spatiality of knowledge formation in firms. The book concludes by discussing the corporate governance implications of learning based on competencies and communities, and a how national science and technology policies might respond to the idea of learning as a distributed, non-cognitive, practice-based phenomenon.ReviewThis book provides a fruitful interrogation of the effect of interaction on the production of knowledge, asking how knowledge is produced and shared when economic agents work together. By bringing together such a rich and varied selection of conceptual ideas, and by weaving them into a compelling story, Amin and Cohendet will no doubt succeed in inspiring many others to explore new relational geographies of knowing through more intensive, detailed empirical analysis. Our emerging understanding of the ever-evolving geographies of knowledge production and circulation will be the richer for it. --Economic GeographyIn Architectures of Knowledge, Ash Amin and Patrick Cohendet provide a comprehensive synthesis of approaches to the production and use of knowledge in firms...The strength of the book is the interplay between the knowledge and theoretical positions of the two authors.--Regional StudiesAbout the AuthorAsh Amin is Professor of Geography at Durham University. He has held Fellowships and Visiting Professorships at the Universities of Naples, Venice, Bologna, Copenhagen, Rotterdam and Uppsala. He is a founding co-editor of the Review of International Political Economy and co-editor of Cities. He was Member of the Steering Committee of the European Association for Evolutionary Political Economy (EAEPE) from its foundation in 1989 to 1999. He was member of the Economic and Social Research Councils Research Priorities Board from 1997 to 2001. He is an academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences. His research interests lie in the fields of urban and regional development, the geography of the post-mass production economy, spatialities of globalisation, governance alternatives to market and hierarchy, urban democracy and the multicultural city, the geography of the social economy, and the cultural economy. Patrick Cohendet is Professor of Economics at University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, France. He has held Fellowships and Visiting Professorships at the Universities of UVA (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA), Toyo (Tokyo, Japan), and HEC-Montreal (Canada). He is one of the co-founders and members of BETA (Bureau deconomie theorique et appliquee), a research group in economics and management of the University Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg. He is member of the commitee of national research (CNRS) in economics and management. He was Member of CADAS (comite dapplications de lacademie des sciences ) from 1989 to 1999. His research interests lie in the fields of economics of innovation, economics of knowledge, theory of the firm, theory of decision, industrial organization and research policy.