Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from
medieval times to the early modern epoch. 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 sought—successfully—to feed upon this commerce and—unsuccessfully—to
regulate slavery and racial relations.

To illustrate this history, 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 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, predicated on the murderous toil of the
plantations, made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution
and the rise of the West.