A comprehensive study of how slavery and enslaved people shaped
the modern world.
A World Transformed explores how slavery thrived at the heart
of the entire Western world for more than three centuries. Arguing
that slavery can be fully understood only by stepping back from
traditional national histories, this book collects the scattered
accounts of the latest modern scholarship into a comprehensive
history of slavery and its shaping of the world we know. Celebrated
historian James Walvin tells a global story that covers everything
from the capitalist economy, labor, and the environment, to social
culture and ideas of family, beauty, and taste.
This book underscores just how thoroughly slavery is responsible for
the making of the modern world. The enforced transportation and labor
of millions of Africans became a massive social and economic force,
catalyzing the rapid development of multiple new and enormous trading
systems with profound global consequences. The labor and products of
enslaved people changed the consumption habits of millions––in
India and Asia, Europe and Africa, in colonized and Indigenous
American societies. Across time, slavery shaped many of the dominant
features of Western taste: items and habits or rare and costly
luxuries, some of which might seem, at first glance, utterly removed
from the horrific reality of slavery. A World Transformed
traces the global impacts of slavery over centuries, far beyond legal
or historical endpoints, confirming that the world created by slave
labor lives on today.
