Trouble of the World: Slavery and Empire in the Age of Capital

In the mid-nineteenth century, U.S. slavery was characterized by relentless expansion and unrelenting exportation, not only of commodities but also of ideas. Zach Sell traces U.S. slavery’s significance to colonial land-based dispossessions on a global scale, showing how slavery molded the United States as an empire-state while other imperial powers looked to it as a model for their own colonial projects. The narrative follows British factory owners and southern plantation owners as they worked to incorporate various kinds of laborers into global circuits of production and consumption, bringing enslaved African Americans, colonial subjects, Indigenous people, and factory workers together. Looking to the rough edges of empire, Sell narrates the struggles of overseers hired away from U.S. plantations to introduce rice and cotton production across colonial India, the efforts of investors in plantations to bring formerly enslaved people and U.S. slaveholders to British Honduras, and more. What emerges is a tale of a system too powerful and too profitable to end, even after emancipation; it is the story of how slavery’s influence survived emancipation, infusing empire and capitalism to this day.